Giuseppe Tornatore’s eleventh feature, “The Best Offer,” (La migliore offerta) mingles spunk and mildew in its melodramatic take on a wealthy, solitary art expert and auctioneer, Virgil Oldman (Geoffrey Rush), turning to fraud late in life, at his sixty-third birthday, over, wouldn’t you know it, a young woman (Sylvia Hoeks) who has an estate to be settled. Mysteries coil from every conversation and encounter; the story’s scaffolding will shift with the slightest wind. Tornatore’s customary flourishes abound: His camera remains as high-strung as his eye for furnishings stays cool. There are pricey or picayune details everywhere, down to the ever-shifting state of Rush’s hair. Rush begins at louche and arrives at lovingly ripe: as ever, he’s a clown of Shakespearean largess. He gets Tornatore’s joke, and how to dance along a line to keep it from devolving into camp, no matter how many things pile up: forgeries, automatons, wax cylinders, vast rooms with high walls clotted with centuries of purloined portraits of women: no end, no end to the detail. Jim Sturgess is on hand as a mechanical whiz, and Donald Sutherland’s snowy beard makes an appearance along with Sutherland, who plays a painter friend of Oldman’s. The hodge-podge of stuff remains watchable, if slightly in the shadows from the bonkeroo rendition of art-world shenanigans in Danny Boyle’s self-immolating “Trance.” (As well as the sixty-fifth birthday melancholy on display in “The Great Beauty.”) Comparatively, as thrillers go, “The Best Offer” is a forgery of catnip. The Morricone-esque score is by Ennio Morricone. 131m. (Ray Pride)
“The Best Offer” is now playing at Siskel through January 30.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s Senior Editor and Film Critic. He is a contributing editor of Filmmaker magazine.
Ray’s history of Chicago Ghost Signs is planned for publication next year. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram. More photography on Instagram.
Heart: A Review of Soul The real world is soulful, too, in Pixar's bountiful life of the mind.
Seeing The Elephant: A Review Of Babylon The boisterous, brawling yet melancholy "Babylon," is a variation on film history, but more drawing for drama. It's gaudy and mean, celebratory and sorrowful.
Spawn Sacrifice: A Review Of The Creator "The Creator" is richly detailed, punchy, pulpy, punkish entertainment that still has highly serious subjects in mind, without growing didactic and with substantial heart.
Uncanny Ally: A Review Of M3GAN "M3GAN" sells itself in its first handful of seconds in how it introduces the handiwork of roboticist Gemma (Allison Williams, "Get Out") and her present product, PurrPetual Petz from Funki.
A Drag Getting Old: A Review Of Indiana Jones 5 In the protracted opening couple of reels, a very young, computer-crafted Harrison Ford plays a younger cultural marauder who first encounters the dull MacGuffin of the title.
Fine Line: A Review Of Shortcomings It's a season for the comeuppance of a curmudgeon in Randall Park's smart, biting "Shortcomings," adapted by Adrian Tomine from his graphic novel of the same name.
RECOMMENDED
