I‘m not sure whether to feel sorry for Halle Berry. She is, after all, one of the most beautiful women in the world and her turns in Introducing Dorothy Dandridge and Monster’s Ball (for which she won an Oscar) proved she’s got talent. But for all of her talent and accolades, she has a penchant for getting involved in inane movie projects—Swordfish, Catwoman, Gothika, and now Perfect Stranger.
In this “sexy thriller,” Berry plays Rowena, an investigative journalist for the New York Courier. We pick up her story just as she’s exposed a Mark Foley-like scandal. Her paper subsequently squashes the story and Ro quits after a drunken verbal tirade sponsored by the First Amendment.
After angrily walking out on her job, Ro runs to make the train and is followed by a woman calling out her name. Ro ignores her, as if she doesn’t know her. Once Ro misses the train and the woman catches up with her in the station, Ro calls her Grace and tries to ignore her in the way you only can if you do actually know the person. Faced with conflicting clues, I wondered if Grace was mistaking Ro for someone else; perhaps she was a crazy-streetwalker-cum-sage who was speaking some mysterious prophecy; I even toyed with the idea that this Grace was a ghost.
Grace’s rendezvous with Ro is an attempt to entice Ro to become an instrument of revenge; Grace’s high-profile married lover, Harrison Hill, is now spurning her advances, and she wants Ro to reveal his philandering ways to the world. Rowena demurs with irritation, but Grace forces her to take a stack of incriminating e-mails as Ro gets on the next train. They part as Grace smirks, “Say hi to your mom.”
Oh-so-gradually we learn that Rowena and Grace are childhood friends whose relationship has turned sour. (Note to self: She’s not a ghost.) But when Grace turns up dead a week after their meeting in the subway (Note to self: now she is a ghost! I knew there was something dead about her), Rowena goes on a crusade to track down the killer. Suspect number one: Harrison Hill.
Hill, played by Bruce Willis, is a slick ad man with a soft spot for pretty girls that Ro hits hard. With a wardrobe of tight skirts and low-cut blouses, she goes undercover in his ad agency to gather evidence that he offed Grace in order to keep her from exposing their affair. If his moneybags wife found out, he stood to lose everything. His motives seem obvious. But, are they? (dun, dun, duuuun)
Ro’s accomplice in her undercover effort is her friend and tech guru Miles (Giovanni Ribisi). As all movie tech gurus do, Miles performs impossibly fast feats involving firewalls and passwords and secret files. And also as all movie tech gurus do, he’s crushing hard on the leading lady. He is both the most likeable and the creepiest character in the movie—a testament to Ribisi’s always complex take on even the most peripheral people in any plot. A scene in which Ro stumbles into a secret room in his apartment is one of the most disturbing in the whole movie.
Perfect Stranger has a convoluted, dream-like quality. Whole scenes, like one in which Ro appears to be at an accident investigation scene (her job might have provided some reason for her to be there, but she’s already quit by this point), aren’t explained at all. Characters come in and out of view with few concrete details about how they’re connected to one another. Grace’s introduction is porous. And the friendly intimacy between Miles and Ro has no context. When Ro starts again to see the boyfriend who cheated on her with Grace, we start to wonder how well we’ve been introduced to our intrepid journalist herself.
I think this amorphous quality is meant to be a creative driver for tension. Instead, when the twists start twisting, I, quite frankly, didn’t care about the outcome. It’s not exactly the experience one hopes to have 90 minutes into a “who done it?” movie. And it wasn’t surprising to learn that the director filmed three different endings to the movie, each with a different character as the killer. The plot is so ridden with holes that anyone could have done it. Cue moral ambiguity.
Interestingly, this hole-ridden, morally ambiguous tale was penned by a Christian, Todd Komarnicki (whose first movie was Elf, which he produced). In a 2003 interview with Christianity Today, Komarnicki emphasized the importance of telling a good story: “We have a savior who was a storyteller, [so] I think there is great value in story … I think it’s a very powerful tool. Certainly, like any tool, it can be misused.” He concluded by saying that “storytelling is what makes the movie business work.”
Too bad it didn’t work for this movie. A typical episode of Law and Order is less ridden with cliché (which is saying something, given that the series is about as formulaic as it gets) and more satisfying. You’d probably be happier if you stayed home. And as for Halle Berry, I suggest she get a new person to screen her scripts. Her talents could be far better employed.
Talk About It
Discussion starters- How should Rowena have dealt with Grace’s manipulation? What options did she have?
- React to Harrison Hill’s statement that, in business, you must “kill or become irrelevant.” If true, is it possible for a Christian to function is this sort of environment?
- What do you think is the moral of Perfect Stranger?
The Family Corner
For parents to considerPerfect Stranger is rated R for sexual content, nudity, some disturbing violent images, and language. Two gruesome murders serve as the impetus for this movie’s action. For one, there’s a disturbing shot of the mangled corpse, and for the other, we see a brutal act of violence. Participants in the sex scenes (sometimes adulterous) are mostly clothed, but explicit pornography is displayed throughout the movie, especially in the home of one characterwho ispossibly a porn addict. Dialogue is also rife with kinky, sexual innuendo and there are implications of child sexual abuse in flashback sequences.
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