BEFORE: Willem Dafoe carries over from "Wild at Heart", moving from playing a hitman to playing a kidnapper.
THE PLOT: As an executive is held captive by an employee, it's up to his wife to deliver the ransom.
AFTER: This sort of feels like a film that was a bit ahead of its time, released in 2004, just a few years before the Great Recession. One would expect to see more of this thing after large corporate layoffs, with disgruntled employees seeking some form of payback from executives.
Regarding the character of the wife, tonight the pendulum swings back the other way - almost all of the women in "Wild at Heart" were portrayed as emotional wrecks, always one bad circumstance away from screaming hysterically at full volume. One could watch the portrayal of the wife here and think that she doesn't show nearly enough emotion for someone whose husband has been kidnapped. I can choose to view this as a stylistic choice, or as an insight into her character. After all, there is no default level of grief or remorse, it's different for everyone. It could give a clue to the nature of their relationship, a long-term marriage that has seen its share of trials over the years, or could be in decline.
The film consists to two almost-separate storylines, one with the kidnapper and executive, and the other with the wife and the FBI agents. They can't possibly be occuring simultaneously, because we see the wife after the first night the husband doesn't come home, and after that we see the kidnapping take place, which logically must have happened prior. The film proceeds to cut between the two storylines, which again suggests a similar time-frame. But this doesn't make sense either.
ASIDE: There could be a lot of reasons why a man doesn't make it home from the office. He could have fallen asleep at his desk, or gone out for a few drinks with co-workers and then was too buzzed to drive home safely. He could have worked late and then encountered car trouble - any of these scenarios are possible, as are countless others. And he might not want to call home because doing so would wake up his wife. Still, you'd think that she would have called him when he missed dinner and then not showed up at home by, say, 11 pm. The fact that she didn't either shows that he's done this before, or they're at a point in their relationship where she just doesn't care. End of ASIDE.
The mere suggestion, however, that the storylines are not concurrent is what preserves the element of suspense. The tense situation between the kidnapper and his victim might be already over, with a good or bad result, before the wife is instructed to deliver the ransom. And while I'm a big fan of telling a story with a beginning, middle and end in that order, I realize that it wouldn't have made sense here to arrange the scenes chronologically, which would have dispelled much of the suspense.
A relatively short film today, but at least it didn't over-reach itself or try to be anything other than what it was.
Also starring Robert Redford (last seen in "The Horse Whisperer"), Helen Mirren (last seen in "Red"), Matt Craven (last seen in "X-Men: First Class"), Wendy Crewson.
RATING: 4 out of 10 classified ads
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