In attempting to turn a stage play into a movie, the usual route is to open it up — to build in some scenes that take the action outdoors, or into freshly imagined environments. The new English film "44 Inch Chest" makes token gestures in those directions — brief ventures out onto the nighttime streets and into a private gambling club — but it never shrugs off its feeling of talky, stage-bound confinement. Which is odd, since the film was made from an original script — it never was a play.
It's an actors' film, as they say — which is not the same thing as an audience film. The cast is first-rate, but the story in which they mill about is rickety and undernourished. Ray Winstone plays Colin, a London gangster whose wife, Liz (Joanne Whalley), has just left him for another man — leaving her husband a blubbering, woebegone mess. Colin's fellow hoods rally to his side: the doughy mama's boy Archie (Tom Wilkinson); the spiffy Mal (Stephen Dillane); the serenely gay Meredith (Ian McShane); and the snarling gang boss Old Man Peanut (John Hurt). The first thing they do is pay a visit to the restaurant where Liz's lover, hereinafter referred to only as Loverboy (Melvil Poupaud), is employed as a waiter. Dragging him outside into a van, they tune him up a bit, then take him to a bare room — a gang hideaway, presumably — where they lock him in a closet. Then they bring Colin in to confront the guy and, almost certainly, to kill him.
Apart from flashbacks that show us the bloody marital breakup ("Love is like a garden," Colin angrily tells Liz, "and you haven't been doing the weeding"), and Meredith making a big roulette score the night before, and a curious conversation with an old man and his dog, the movie remains rooted in that drab room. There's a lot of pacing and waiting. Will Colin shoot Loverboy? He's not sure. He rants and slumps and sobs and just can't make up his mind. Finally, after 90 minutes, he makes up his mind. And that's it.
Winstone, with his bullish bonhomie, is always an invigorating screen presence. But there's not much he can do with a two-note character like Colin, who is by turns furious and heartbroken and nothing else. The characters played by Wilkinson and Dillane are too weakly conceived to really register; and Hurt has been encouraged to overact in a thoroughly lunatic manner. This leaves McShane's preening queen to walk away with the picture. We first see Meredith in his swank apartment, contemplating a naked boy fetchingly stretched out on a sofa; it's a funny shot, and McShane's expression of pursed anticipation tells us all we need to know about the character's droll hedonism. Later, joining the rest of the mugs in the hostage room, he says with a purr, "What's happening, kittens?" We want to know more about Meredith. We want to follow him back into his own life, into a more interesting world. Anything to get out of this damn room.
Don't miss Kurt Loder's review of "Edge of Darkness," also new in theaters this week.
Check out everything we've got on "44 Inch Chest."
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