"Alfie"

Jude Law stars as an irresistible womanizer in a well-made suit in this remake of the 1966 classic. So how does he compare with original Alfie Michael Caine?

By Stephanie Zacharek

Nov 5, 2004 | The problem with "Alfie" -- both Lewis Gilbert's 1966 original and Charles Shyer's new remake -- is that its story, a squooshy redemption fable masquerading as astute character observation, asks the impossible of its lead actor. The difference is that Michael Caine delivered the impossible; Jude Law can't.

In the original "Alfie," Caine plays a chilly cad who's irresistible to women: In just one instance of the picture's sledgehammer subtlety, he consistently refers to Jane Asher, the shy, eager-to-please country girl who slavishly cooks and cleans for (and sleeps with) him, as "it" -- the movie wants us to know that in Alfie's eyes, a woman ranks much lower than even a regular human being. But as Caine plays him, Alfie doesn't need to use harsh, impersonal pronouns: His coldness wafts off him like vapor off dry ice. He has a sensitive side, but it's fully veiled by that polar smoke -- we may get glimpses of the anguished, animal shape of his soul, but by design, we can't get close enough to smooth down and calm its fur. Still, we know it's there -- that kind of subliminal conviction is just part of what an extraordinary actor like Caine is capable of.

Jude Law isn't extraordinary -- at best he's just raffishly appealing -- so you almost can't hold it against him that he underdelivers in a role that's more a conceit than a character, anyway. This new "Alfie" takes place in modern-day New York (instead of London, the setting for the original), and co-screenwriters Shyer (director of the schmaltzy "Father of the Bride" remakes, as well as cuddlefest "Private Benjamin") and Elaine Pope have taken quite a few other tweaks and tucks and pinches to make the story more believable for modern audiences. Essentially, though, it clings wearily in spirit to the original: It suffers from delusions of jazziness, but it's really deeply conventional.

Buzzing from flower to flower and hopping from bed to bed, Law's bad-boy Alfie is the original "He's just not that into you" guy -- at one point he announces that he rejected a woman because she had hair on her arms. He zips around on a sexy motorscooter, and favors trimly tailored European suits (bought on sale, naturally, because while Alfie has style to burn, he doesn't have a whole lot of dough).

Law gives us the world according to Alfie straight up, addressing the camera directly, the same device used in the original. We learn that as far as women go, men aren't really interested in much other than FBB (face, boobs, bum), and that married women are automatically needy, pathetic and unbearable ("There's one thing that puts me off marriage, it's married women"). Alfie will never commit, and we're meant to see how empty his life is. In case we miss the point, Shyer bludgeons us with obvious shots of city billboards that read "SEARCH," "DESIRE" and "WISH" in giant letters; at one point, the camera lingers, with syrupy portent, on the word "lost" in the poster for Bruce Weber's "Let's Get Lost" that hangs in Alfie's apartment.

Alfie gets his comeuppance, as he must, and because we know it's coming, we carry a puritan sense of foreboding with us through all of "Alfie" -- it spoils our fun as well as his. We're primed to thoroughly disapprove of Alfie's cluelessness and cruelty (and while much of what Alfie does could be considered benign if we're talking about consensual sexual relations between adults, his emotional cruelty to people who care about him is something else again).

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