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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Diane Lane's sophisticated performance can't rescue Adrian Lyne's "Unfaithful" from its sleazy moralizing.
May 10, 2002 | Actors are the most miraculous thing the movies have to offer us -- especially when the odds are stacked against them. Faster and more devastatingly than any special effect, actors who can be believable and authentic in a phony movie can reduce you to a state of wondering: "How did they do that?"
That's pretty much the state in which I watched Diane Lane's extraordinary performance in the new "Unfaithful." This drama of infidelity is exactly what you might expect from Adrian Lyne, the director of "9 1/2 Weeks," "Fatal Attraction" and "Indecent Proposal." The Cecil B. DeMille of our age, Lyne titillates with one hand and moralizes with the other. The audience gets the cheap thrills they came for, and they get to feel morally superior to those thrills at the same time. Lyne essentially makes tony exploitation films. Lane subverts him and his movie with a performance of unusual maturity and sexual honesty.
Diane Lane has been in the movies for more than 25 years now and she's never gotten the recognition she deserves. Part of the reason is that, after her stunning early work in Lamont Johnson's charming western "Cattle Annie and Little Britches" (a film that also marked the movie debut of Amanda Plummer), where she held her own against the likes of Burt Lancaster and Rod Steiger, Lane went through a period of mannered, forced acting. The movies she was making, Francis Ford Coppola follies like "The Outsiders," "Rumble Fish" and "The Cotton Club," didn't help. (She fared better in Walter Hill's 1984 "Streets of Fire," a slick apotheosis of rock 'n' roll movies -- and nearly every other type of B picture you'd care to name -- that's prime for rediscovery.)
At her best Lane seems both fastidious and utterly fresh, ripe and tentative at the same time. She brought all those qualities to the film that signaled her return as an actor, Stacy Cochran's 1992 "My New Gun" (one of the best movies American indie cinema has produced). Since then, Lane has only grown. She turned in wonderful performances as the '60s Jewish housewife who has an affair with a hippie in "A Walk on the Moon," and as the working-class woman waiting for her fisherman boyfriend to ride out a killer hurricane in "The Perfect Storm."
"Unfaithful"
Directed by Adrian Lyne
Starring Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Olivier Martinez, Zeljko Ivanek
Reviews of that performance concentrated on the deficiencies of Lane's New England accent. But audiences and critics who are unduly impressed by accents often overlook the emotional realities of an actor's performance. That's why every well-spoken mediocre English actor who steps off the boat -- can you say Ralph Fiennes? -- is hailed as if he were the new Olivier.
In those movies, Lane displayed the sort of unprotected emotional openness that is really a mark of an actor's bravery. Lane's eyes and the surprisingly hard set of her delicate features can make her appear tough, as if she'd be perfect playing a noir femme fatale. She is affecting precisely because that aura stands in sharp contrast to her weatherbeaten vulnerability. She has a wary, almost bruised way of smiling that tells you that the women she plays have paid (or expect to pay) for every moment of happiness. So they sacrifice their security, even as the tremors of feeling that cross Lane's face tell you they expect the worst.
Sensational as she was in "My New Gun," "A Walk on the Moon" and "The Perfect Storm," those performances were a warm-up for what she does in "Unfaithful." Lane plays Connie Sumner, a Westchester housewife living an affluent suburban existence. There are suggestions that something is wrong. Her executive husband, Edward (Richard Gere), seems preoccupied with his work, and the movie drops hints that he has a jealous streak. But for Connie those are ephemeral irritations. The lines of communication are still open between Connie and Edward, and they've still got a sex life. It's a good marriage -- which only makes the dissatisfaction you sense gnawing at Connie all the more potent. So it's no surprise when Connie begins an affair with a 28-year-old European book dealer (Olivier Martinez) she runs into -- literally -- during a shopping trip to SoHo. If there's anything daring in "Unfaithful," it's the way Lane makes Connie's decision to risk her comfort and her security -- even for a guy we see is a shallow young stud -- seem reasonable.
