The Ice Princess Thaws, and It’s Devastating

By Nicholas Barber

Film 2 I’ve Loved You So Long Philippe Claudel 115 MINS, 12A Righteous Kill Jon Avnet 101 MINS, 15 Appaloosa Ed Harris 115 MINS, 15

There always seems to be a thin wall of ice between Kristin Scott Thomas and her co-stars. But there’s a good reason for her detachment in I’ve Loved You So Long, a French drama which, at last, gives her the sole lead role. I shouldn’t reveal what that reason is, though. At the start of the film, all we know is that she’s a hunched, taciturn figure who comes to stay with her younger sister (Elsa Zylberstein) after a lengthy separation. Zylberstein is a lecturer who lives with her husband and their “Benetton family”: a mute, Polish-Russian father-in-law and two adopted Vietnamese girls.

They all have their questions about the stranger in their home, and so does the audience, but Philippe Claudel, a novelist turned writer-director, doesn’t answer them straight away. His impeccably paced mystery offers up its secrets piece by piece, just as Scott Thomas’s character thaws out drip by drip. It’s a subtly devastating performance, but Scott Thomas almost spoils it with a shouty, histrionic speech at the end. As we all know from hearing her say “You, Charles” in Four Weddings and a Funeral, she’s so poignant when she’s being reserved that there’s no need for her to shriek her head off.

The prospect of seeing Robert De Niro and Al Pacino acting in tandem for an entire film – as opposed to the few minutes of screentime they shared in Heat – is undeniably exciting. That is, it’s exciting until you remember every single film which either actor has been in over the past decade, when suddenly it’s not very exciting at all. Sadly, Righteous Kill is more on a par with their recent outings than it is with Heat, let alone with The Godfather Part II, which featured them both in separate scenes.

De Niro and Pacino play NYPD detectives on the trail of a serial killer. All of the victims are criminals who have dodged prison on technicalities, so the detectives speculate that the murderer could be a policeman – perhaps even one of them. Like Inside Man, the last film from the same screenwriter, Righteous Kill is constructed around a final twist. Unlike Inside Man, however, the twist is utterly predictable, which doesn’t leave anything except a hackneyed police procedural.

A marginally less wrinkly pair of lawmen feature in Appaloosa, a western starring Ed Harris, also the co-writer-director, and Viggo Mortensen. These two gunslingers are hired to rescue a small town from a diabolical rancher, Jeremy Irons, so it looks as if we’re in for a classic Wild West showdown. The faces are leathery; the dialogue is terse; the hats are big; and the deserts skies are bigger.

But the one element of Appaloosa which isn’t classic is a story that drifts around like tumbleweed, and concludes all of its many plots with an anti-climax. And with all due respect to Renee Zellweger, why do people keep casting her as an irresistible seductress?

(c) 2008 Independent on Sunday, The. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.