The game of ‘Texas Hold’em’ poker is one of progression: over the course of a given hand, the dealer reveals more and more cards to the players as the players themselves raise the stakes of the game (quite literally) until the players themselves reveal their own cards to see who wins and who’s broke. Murder mysteries are the same way: the storyteller gradually reveals more and more secrets to the audience while raising the stakes at the same time, until finally the true identity of the killer is revealed, and we find out who’s going to emergency and who’s going to jail.
The key, in both cases, is to maximize the ability to raise stakes in the game / story, so that, when the payoff comes, its that much bigger. In both cases, though, there are two things that you never do: you never play any cards other than those that you are dealt, and you never show your cards early. Both of these seem like obvious rules, since the first is cheating, and the second is just stupid. Storytellers have been violating the former for so long that there is actually a literary term for it (it’s called ‘Deus Ex Machina’ which means, literally, ‘God in the Machine’, but, really, it means cheating), but the more egregious violations of the ‘stupid’ rule are not the filmmakers, but are, instead, the studios which produce and distribute the films (although the filmmakers have plenty to answer for in this respect).
Most of these crimes against their own films happen due to promotion of the film: in order to convince people to go see the film, they release so much information about and even from the film that they end up revealing elements of the story that give away so much that the audience’s viewing experience is tainted. In other words, the audience knows what will happen before they see it in the movie.
The most deplorable case of this, to me, was “What Lies Beneath” (2000) from filmmaker Robert Zemeckis (“Back to the Future” trilogy, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”, “Forest Gump”). In the middle of making “Cast Away”, the crew took a break from making that film so that Tom Hanks could lose the equivalent of Peter Dinklage in weight, and followed Zemeckis in that time-honored quest to which every filmmaker seems to feel obliged: namely to massacre the works of Alfred Hitchcock and call it ‘homage’ (I’m looking at you, Brian De Palma). Zemeckis would’ve pulled it off, too, if it weren’t for the trailers. The studio marketing department, being as brilliant as they are, used, as the story synopsis for the trailer, the major dramatic reveal from the later half of the second act, effectively giving away the movie, and, therefore, making the entire first eighty minutes of the film unnecessary. Too bad for Zemeckis, since he (and screenwriter Clark Gregg) had created the most Hitchcockian film I’ve seen since “Charade” (1963).
Since “What Lies Beneath”, I have not seen a film quite so violated by the ‘stupid’ rule (although I’ve seen some come close).
That is, until now.
And this most recent violation blows “What Lies Beneath” out of the water.
As I said, you never show your cards early. In a ‘whodunit’ type murder mystery, that means you don’t say who the killer is. You don’t show his face if there’s a kill scene in the first act. You don’t show him holding the one piece of incriminating evidence that the killer was just holding immediately after that same scene. You don’t give him a song and dance number following that scene in which he declares himself the killer.
You definitely, under any circumstances, do not credit any actor with both their character’s real name and the killer’s nom de guerre side by side (see, there’s this thing called ‘the internet’, I know it seems like just a fad now, but . . .).
In the case of “Faces In A Crowd”, this is exactly what was done. This would be bad enough, but this mistake is compounded by the nature of this film, in which characters are portrayed by multiple, even numerous actors as a way of presenting the main character’s affliction. When the point of the film is that you can’t tell who’s who without a scorecard, you don’t taint the scorecard.
This is, unfortunately for me and any other viewers, not the only crime committed against this film. The film itself is, in its entirety, a crime against its own potential. As stated, the film is the story of a woman who is the only witness to have seen the face of a serial killer and survived, but far from being able to help the police catch the killer, she is forced to relearn how to live her life as an injury sustained in her flight from the killer’s chase has left her unable to recognize people’s faces, even, and most arduous, those to whom she is closest.
This premise doesn’t just imply potential, it demands it, screams and cries out for it like Pinocchio entreating his own humanity. Unfortunately, the filmmakers were hardly up to the task of executing their plot; instead falling back on devices of cliche older than Otto Preminger (legendary filmmaker of “Laura” and “Porgy and Bess”, not, fortunately, connected to this film in any way). Each particular ‘twist’ and ‘revelation’ is more predictable than the last, so that, once the secrets which the aforementioned ‘scorecard’ revealed are finally arrived at, they’ve already been made so plainly inevitable as to declare a pardon for the earlier crime of stupidity.
In the end, the best thing I can say for “Faces In A Crowd” is that it would make a fitting addition to the ‘Lifetime Movie Network’.
