Even in its most buoyant moments, Stephen Frears’s The Grifters retains a palpable, stifling air of desperation and moral rot. The trio of grifters at the center of the 1990 crime thriller are introduced via a visual triptych, in which each of them are donning designer sunglasses and a slick outfit as they ready themselves for their respective cons. But despite their suave appearances, these schemers—Lilly (Anjelica Huston), Roy (John Cuscack), and Myra (Annette Bening)—aren’t living large.
There are no obscenely rich marks, no luxurious locales, no big score that’ll allow them to sail off into the sunset. No, while Lilly skims a little off the top of her employer’s winnings at a horse racetrack, Roy heads to a dive bar for a money swap that nets him a whopping $10 and Myra seduces a jewelry shop owner. Roy later works a similar scam that earns him a punch in the gut so hard that he ends up in the emergency room, while Myra eventually offers her body to her landlord just to waive a month’s rent. All three seem destined for a future of diminishing returns, and things like self-respect, integrity, or codes of honor are only weaknesses that would get in the way of their only goal: taking their mark at any cost.
Throughout his screenplay, crime novelist Donald E. Westlake captures all the despondency and nihilism prevalent in the hard-boiled prose and caustic dialogue of Jim Thompson’s 1963 novel of the same name. And along with an odious portrait of a perverse world of scammers and double-crossers, Frears’s film also carries with it the distressing Oedipal charge that grips its central trio, adding a sickly hue of psychosexual despair to the equation.
Lilly, Roy, and Myra are ostensibly connected through love—that between a mother and son with Lilly and Roy, and between two lovers with Roy and Myra. But just like their work, this love, or forbidden lust, is ultimately revealed to be unscrupulous—genuine only as long as it’s not more useful to be wrapped up neatly within yet another scam.
An air of fatalism hangs over the characters, whose increasingly risky behavior is countered only by a frantic desire to survive. For as good as they are as grifters, every move they make that, in their mind, takes them one step forward only causes them to circle down the drain that much faster. It may pay an acute attention to the specific deftness and expertise at play in Lilly, Roy, and Myra’s ploys, but The Grifters isn’t nearly as interested in elevating their craft as it is in detailing the soul-sucking, all-corrupting nature of life on the grift.
Image/Sound
Criterion has sourced a new 4K digital restoration for this release. Blacks are inky and colors are naturalistic, helping the image to stay true to the film’s grim palette and reduced saturation, which was originally accomplished with the bleach bypass process. Meanwhile, the grain is tight and even, with the immaculate image detail presenting every grimy, sleazy act with the utmost precision. The 2.0 surround audio gets the job done, with clean dialogue and a robust mix that nicely handles the high and low ends of Elmer Bernstein’s playful, dexterous score.
Extras
On the disc’s included audio commentary, originally recorded in 2013, Stephen Frears, John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, and Donald E. Westlake discuss what drew them to the project. That all four were clearly recorded at different times prevents the track from flowing naturally, but their collective enthusiasm for Jim Thompson’s novel, Westlake’s script, and the final film comes through in their discussions of the casting process and details of the film’s shoot. The making-of doc, also from 2013, includes interviews with the same four participants and doesn’t add much beyond how Frears and Westlake approached their adaptation of the book.
More substantial and informative interviews are found in the 75-minute program made in 2018, in which a number of crew members talk about Martin Scorsese’s involvement in the film, which he produced, the decision to shift the focus away from Roy and toward the two women for the film, and Elmer Bernstein’s contentious relationship with the filmmakers. There’s also a featurette on Thompson, a new interview with Annette Bening, who discusses how liberating it was for her to play Myra, and a booklet essay by author Geoffrey O’Brien, who discusses, among other things, the similarities and differences between Thompson’s novel and Frears’s film.
Overall
More than 30 years after its release, Stephen Frears’s The Grifters remains one of the queasiest, most nihilistic crime thrillers of all time.
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