SLIGHT CASE OF MURDER - DVD review

During the past three decades, William H. Macy has established himself as one of Hollywood's best and most-recognized character actors. He hasn't done much starring work or gotten a lot of credit, although his turn in "The Cooler" was terrific, and the Academy nominated him for a supporting role in "Fargo." He has one of those faces that seem ready-made for character work, full of hangdog expression, almost demanding sympathy but never finding it. I mention this because in the 1999 TNT original movie "A Slight Case of Murder" he had the chance to tailor a script to his own specifications, he and director Steven Schachter adapting a novel by mystery writer Donald E. Westlake to his personal needs. The result is a comedy-thriller that is really pretty nifty, with a topflight cast by television standards.

You may be familiar with Donald E. Westlake; he's published under a number of pseudonyms, most famously as Richard Stark, and he's written a number of things you may know, like the novel "The Hunter," which Hollywood turned into "Point Blank" and "Payback," and "The Busy Body," "The Outfit," "The Bank Shot," "The Hot Rock," "The Stepfather" films, and "Slayground," among many more. This one, "A Slight Case of Murder" (based on Westlake's "The Travesty"), should not be confused with the old Edward G. Robinson film of the same name, but both movies abound in black humor and use homicide as the underpinning for the merriment.

OK, you remember Bill Macy's character in "Fargo," the mild-mannered, all-American guy-next-door who tried to remain looking perfectly innocent while being guilty as sin. Same thing here. The film's biggest asset is watching Macy's character sweat. And we do this from the moment the movie begins to the very end. It's as though Macy said to himself, If I could do it in a supporting role, why not in a leading role? So instead of having a pregnant Frances McDormand upstaging him all the time, he's got the picture pretty much to himself, with a few good supporting actors around, just in case.

Macy plays Terry Thorpe, an acerbic, not-so-likeable movie critic with his own cable TV segment on a New York City news show. He is also a single fellow who is inexplicably romancing several beautiful women at the same time. The script never explains what draws these women to him (he's hardly a heartthrob), but, I mean, when you get to co-write your own script, why not? Or maybe it's because he's a movie critic; everybody knows that movie critics are notorious lovers.

When the story opens, Thorpe is in a woman's apartment, Laura Penney's; she is one of the women with whom he's having an affair. She is lying dead on the floor, having slipped, he tells us, on an ice cube and hit her head during a heated discussion concerning another of Thorpe's girlfriends, Kit Wannamaker (Felicity Huffman). What is Thorpe to do? If he calls the police, they might think he pushed her deliberately, implicating him as a murderer. Instead, he panics and runs, pretending he was never there.

Thorpe figures he's seen enough mystery movies to know every plot trick in the book and decides he'll use them to fool the police and provide himself with an alibi. But things are not as easy as they seem. They never are. Before you know it, a sleazy private eye, John Edgerson (James Cromwell), is blackmailing him; his other girlfriend, Kit, is getting suspicious of his strange behavior; a police detective, Fred Stapelli (Adam Arkin), investigating the case is also trying to get him to read the screenplay for a crime movie he's written; and Stapelli's wife, Patricia (Julia Campbell), has developed the hots for him. Nothing is easy.

As you can guess, the movie is a spoof of old film-noir mysteries. Thorpe even lectures on the subject of film noir to a college class he's teaching, telling his students that the hero of a noir is not a bad man; he's basically "a good man tripped up by fate." That's Thorpe himself. The more he lies, the deeper he gets in dirt. The film furthers the noir tone with a 1940s' style music track, a bevy of colorful and shady minor characters, and some snappy, Raymond Chandler-like dialogue: "This guy's harder to lose than a bladder infection."

At the same time the movie is paying homage to old-fashioned noirs, it is also an exercise in reflexive, self-referential postmodernism (say that ten times fast). Every two minutes we get an allusion to something in film or literature, from "Gaslight" to "Laura," from "Ferris Bueller" (Macy very often faces the camera and speaks directly to the audience) to "Arsenic and Old Lace." Even actor/director Paul Mazursky shows up playing, what else, a movie director.

If the movie has a major fault, it's that it gets much too silly, much too improbable, and much too far-fetched much too quickly for a film that is supposedly only gently ribbing the noir genre. At one point I thought I was watching Woody Allen's "Take the Money and Run," it's so obvious.

Still, taken for what it is, a rather inconsequential television comedy, "A Slight Case of Murder" is quite good. Compared to a more substantial big-screen product, it shows its origins as a rather talky, formulaic work, designed for a commercial break every ten minutes. Still, it's got William H. Macy in it, and he's always enjoyable, as is James Cromwell, Felicity Huffman, and the others. For me, it was worth the watch.

Video:
Considering that the Turner Network originally made this film for television, the 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen picture is excellent. Even though the detailing may not be high-definition caliber and facial tones can vary somewhat from quite natural to oddly off-kilter, the overall video quality is bright and clear, with hardly a trace of anything that might distract the eye.

Audio:
Like the picture quality, the Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo is very clean. Beyond that and the fact that the audio appears well balanced from top to bottom, there isn't much else to say. It sounds like good monaural, with very little activity in either the left or right front channels or the surrounds. To say that the sound is not very dramatic would be putting it mildly. But it does its job efficiently, and it carries out dialogue, which is 99% of its work, effectively. Just don't ask any more of it.

Extras:
Nothing much here; it was a television production, after all. There is a main menu with twenty-two scene selections, but no chapter insert; there is Engish as the only spoken language; and there are French and Spanish subtitles. Other than that, enjoy the movie.

Parting Thoughts:
It's hard not to find "A Slight Case of Murder" lightly entertaining, as it is the very definition of light entertainment. It's clearly Macy's movie all the way, co-written and starring the man in a story that specially fits his personality. The movie is humorous, if a tad slow; clever, if a touch clichéd; suspenseful, if a bit preposterous. If you're a William H. Macy fan, you'll love the film; if you're not, you still might find it amusing.