Goldie Hawn makes an uneasy transition from comedy to drama in DECEIVED, a dull, muddled attempt at a sleek, Hitchcockian psychological thriller.
Adrienne Saunders (Hawn) is an on-the-go Manhattan art restorer who's busy having it all when fissures of suspicion begin showing up in her picture-perfect marriage to her otherwise passionate, devoted and successful museum curator husband, Jack (John Heard). It all starts when she spots him in
town when he's supposed to be out of New York on business. His attempts at covering up prove shockingly transparent, and her further investigations begin to indicate that her entire marriage may be a tissue of lies and that Jack may be involved with some very shady business on the side with stolen
antiquities. Just when Adrienne thinks she has Jack nailed, he abruptly stages his own death in a phony car accident, substituting for his own corpse that of an extremely fortuitous hitchhiker who apparently matches Jack's physical description--a trick Jack pulled off at least once before to make
himself over into Adrienne's husband.
Jack disappears, but a valuable necklace he had gone through a great deal of trouble stealing from his museum to sell on the black market--including murdering a colleague who had spotted the forgery with which Jack had replaced the original--has fallen into the hands of Adrienne's
cute-as-all-getout young daughter (Ashley Peldon), who, unaware of its true value, has been using it as dress-up costume jewelry. This lapse sets the stage for Jack's unwelcome return into Adrienne's life to chase her around with a knife during the film's semi-suspenseful climax.
Despite yeoman efforts from its classy cast, also including good turns from Jan Rubes and Beatrice Straight, DECEIVED is one of those glamour thrillers that leave you humming the set designs and straining to remember what it was all about. The plot premise itself is serviceable enough,
benefitting from writer Mary Agnes Donoghue's past experience as a publicist at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to etch in its details of skullduggery in the art world. But as psychological thrillers go, DECEIVED could have used a lot less psychology and a lot more thrills.
The plot gets caught up too often in its own intricacies which lead its script into dry, dull stretches of talky exposition that serve no purpose except to slow down the action rather than deepening it, as was presumably intended. It doesn't help that Damian Harris (THE RACHEL PAPERS) directs
with a deficit of urgency, seeming quite at sea when it comes to structuring Donoghue's slow-moving muddle of a script into anything resembling a compelling drama. Still, his staging of the climax is creepily effective, with a good shock payoff. But it also seems to belong in a different film,
unfortunately a better film than the one that actually got made. (Violence.) leave a comment
