Secret in Their Eyes
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Well, this could have been way, way worse. Not much less silly, but way, way worse.
Writer-director Billy Ray’s who-asked-for-this remake of El secreto de sus ojos — Argentina’s 2009 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film — dispenses with much of its source material’s sap, along with a welcome chunk of its running time. At a lean 105 minutes or so, however, and despite much expository handholding, Secret in Their Eyes also whacks the very conceit of its title.
One way it does this is by minimizing a crucial element of the story: a photograph in which a young psycho gives away — with his eyes! with his EYES! — a sexual obsession that will lead to murder. In the original, the eyes thing is given quasi-religious weight; here, it goes by like part of an ad for a C.S.I. rerun. Beyond that, Ray’s characters are abysmal at keeping secrets. Long-simmering (nonhomicidal) obsessions are freely acknowledged. Pivotal alliances that run counter to righteous justice are admitted with minimal interrogation. Looming malice fomented behind closed doors lifts away like a high cirrus cloud with just a light wind of dialogue. Whatever’s in these people’s eyes, the secrets in their mouths tumble forth like weather reports.
The forecast calls for pain. To sum up the original, a guy who kind of looks like Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World spends many years trying to solve a cold case and set aside an unrequited love, then writes a novel about a brokenhearted guy trying to solve a cold case in the shadow of tragedy and ill-starred romance. There’s a second murder. The man must flee, under threat of a junta. Eventually, he shows the novel to the lost paramour, they drink a lot of coffee, and their sadness goes on and on. It is sweeping. It is ridiculous.
To sum up the U.S. version, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Nicole Kidman, drinking zero coffee, make nonsecret eyes at each other while Julia Roberts, in a Joey Ramone wig, slouches toward revenge. Ray makes the story’s central crime more personal to the main characters, allowing him to dump any, how you say, subplots. The result is ridiculous but, mostly for the better, not at all sweeping. No furious trope-mongering here, no shameless melodrama. Just Roberts attempting a version of the Sean Penn Mystic River “Is that my daughter in there” howl tempered with mid-period Sally Field (Not Without My Daughter, Eye for an Eye), the 1,000-watt smile flashed only in short flashbacks to her character’s very ABC Family Channel kind of motherhood. Jeopardy is minimal, junta absent. Ejiofor doesn’t go into exile. In a movie that refers often to 9/11 and needs the Los Angeles Dodgers for its best scene, he hides out by working for the New York Mets. It’s that kind of movie.
