DECEPTION seems on paper one of those great sparkling confections people like Stanley Donen or Hitchcock used to whip up effortlessly--half travelogue, half international potboiler--that really seemed just an excuse to pose young lovers against the backdrop of Paris or someplace more
exotic. But this poorly written film can't hold a candle to the memory of those earlier works.
Bessie Faro (Andie MacDowell) is a kooky housewife who sustains herself on true love and food stamps. One day a package arrives COD, bearing a charred upper plate, presumably her late husband's. As played by Viggo Mortensen (THE INDIAN RUNNER) in numerous flashbacks, Johnny Faro is a treetop
pilot-for-hire whose life seems forever destined to be lived in the shadow of having shagged Bill Yazeroski's pennant-winning sixth-game homer in the 1960 Pirates-Yankees World Series. The adult Johnny is a dreamer who nicknames his wife Ruby Cairo as a promise of their exotic life to come.
Devastated, facing a box of unpaid bills and three children to raise alone, Bessie takes off for Veracruz to verify the plane crash that claimed her husband. And yet seconds off the plane, she stumbles headlong into the dashing Dr. Fergus Lamb (Liam Neeson), a do-gooder firebrand heading up the
Feed the World relief effort. Bessie grills the authorities, identifies the body, and puts her husband in the ground before she discovers a hidden cache of baseball cards in Johnny's desk with the box scores circled. Marshalling pluck heretofore unsuspected, she quickly intuits these as bank
account numbers and begins ambling around the globe, posing as dead baseball players with foreign surnames and raking in six-figure windfalls.
This soon enough irks the requisite heavies, who follow her first to East Berlin, then to Athens, and finally to Cairo, where she again crosses paths with Fergus, who takes a breather from feeding the world to climb the pyramids with her. When she finally sorts out the plot amenities, it turns
out two checks to a German ink conglomerate were actually for chemicals used to make poison gas, which was then smuggled to the Middle East in Fergus's shipments of grain, completely unbeknownst to him. By the time Johnny shows up again in the last act, Harry Lime-like, to affect contrition, and
the light goes on behind Bessie's eyes, it seems inevitable that the ink goons will be along to dispatch him soon enough. Fergus turns up on Bessie's block in the last scene just in time to catch a high pop fly she's hit to left, apparently for reasons of symmetry.
Shot in 1992 under the title RUBY CAIRO by British director Graeme Clifford (FRANCES) and given a brief, limited release, the film wears its budget on its sleeve at every turn. John Barry did the score. Richard Sylbert production designed. Laszlo Kovacs served as cinematographer. And the stars
do what stars are paid to do--smile big in close-up. And still there are gaping plot holes. As if to try and stem this tide of questions which must certainly be mounting, an intrusive voice-over natters at us virtually every second Bessie is off screen, mostly over travel footage, suggesting a
particularly annoying airport loudspeaker, or perhaps a relative's slideshow of a summer vacation. (Violence, profanity.) leave a comment
