"The Thomas Crown Affair"

Glamorous settings, glamorous clothes, glamorous sex: This remake is a deluxe vacation for adults, frills included.

By Charles Taylor

Aug 11, 1999 | "The Thomas Crown Affair" seems to take its cues from Bill Conti's score: It's sprightly, frisky and unexpectedly playful. Conti clears away the bombast that usually clutters his music just as director John McTiernan has cleared away the depressingly familiar clichis of big-budget entertainments. "The Thomas Crown Affair" may turn out to be the most entertaining American movie of the summer, and there isn't a car chase, a shootout or -- unless you count a few smoke bombs -- an explosion in sight. In other words, McTiernan pays the audience the supreme compliment of thinking they'll be kept awake by wit and sexiness and the allure of his two stars, Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, both of them shot like the most irresistible items on the most tempting dessert cart imaginable.

Part caper picture, part cat-and-mouse romance, this remake of the 1968 picture starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway is closer in spirit to what the Bond movies used to be. It's a deluxe vacation for adults with all frills included: glamorous settings, glamorous clothes, glamorous sex. As exotic settings go, New York might seem pretty pedestrian, but the city has put on its best fall colors for Tom Priestly's camera. The residential streets are leafy, inviting rows of brownstones, the avenues bustling and made for strolling. There are a couple of spectacular views, showing New York shot in a way that I've never seen before. One, from an airplane at night, recasts the metropolis as all glowing amber lights. In another, seen from the ocean, the city skyline peeks out of the mist enveloping the shore. That's not a bad touch for a movie whose hero is devoted to Monet -- so devoted that he heists one of the artist's most famous paintings.

Brosnan's Thomas Crown is an acquisitions exec who acquisitions a Monet for his private pleasure. Russo's Catherine Banning is the insurance investigator out to recover the high-toned swag and snag herself the tidy recovery fee. She pegs Crown as the culprit early on and doesn't bother to hide her suspicions from him. The fun of the movie is seeing these two thrust and parry, slipping out of the traps each sets up for the other and not bothering to hide how turned-on they're getting. That turn-on is as much over their own craftiness as each other. Crown and Catherine are supreme egoists and they'd be monsters if they weren't so sleek and stylish and so entertained by their whole cop-and-robber pursuit. Sex and work and trickery amount to pretty much the same thing for this pair, and their immense self-satisfaction is the source of both the movie's sense of humor and its sex appeal. Their flirtation never abates even after they become lovers. Crown and Catherine are mirror images of each other, as Crown's shrink (Dunaway, who looks great and seems to be having a high old time) tells him. Brosnan and Russo cloak their performances in the best kind of irony, not the hip, superior variety, but the sophisticated sort -- they're capable of being amused at every pickle they land themselves in. The movie gets just a tad soggy when Alan Trustman and Kurt Wimmer's script has the leads anguish over how they can trust each other. But those slack patches never last for long, and soon Crown and Catherine are gleefully working out some new way to trip each other up, some new form of seduction that will utterly disarm the opposition.

Delivering James Bond's trademark witticisms, Brosnan always seemed in on a joke he isn't willing to share with the rest of us. Thomas Crown is, if it's possible, even more self-involved, but Brosnan shows more wit, and in an odd way, a lot more generosity than he ever has before. And he seems, for once, to be in on the joke of his own absurd handsomeness. He regards himself with the same detached slyness with which he regards everything else. He's got the lightness that the hero of a romantic caper movie needs and the slight reserve that fits this character. (Which is one reason McQueen didn't work in the original: The role allowed him none of the regular-guy likability he showed in his best performances.) If Brosnan doesn't give a truly memorable performance, he's never less than fun to watch.

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