On the couch

There’s something a bit sad about The Ledge. It’s not the story itself that’s sad – although, depending on your world view, a  tale of adultery, religious fundamentalism and unhappy relationships could be a bit of a miseryfest – and it’s not that The Ledge was made at all.

There’s the kernel of a good flick here – man climbs onto ledge of tall building to kill himself, cop tries to talk him out of it, flashbacks reveal the cop’s lousy day and the series of events that led the jumper to his perch. Modern attitudes to religion, faith and fidelity are all significant elements of the plot.
What’s worthy of a pronounced sigh and a stare out the window is that fact that The Ledge wasn’t made better. Maybe with more money. Or better actors. Or a script that didn’t bear a nagging resemblance to an elaborate and well thought out student project – chock full of good ideas and subtext and not afraid to use them like a metaphorical lead pipe wrapped around an actual lead pipe to beat them into the audience.
Living with his gay, HIV positive roommate Chris, the plot reveals early on that Gavin new neighbours, Shana and Joe (Liv Tyler and Patrick Wilson) are Born-Again Christians and Joe, in particular, sees it as their duty to try and turn the two boys from their “sinful life”. Aggravated by Joe’s neighbour’s prejudice Gavin falls victim to a little coveting of his neighbour’s wife and finds his affections not entirely rebuffed. What will happen when hubby cottons on to their burgeoning romance?
Charlie Hunnam stars as Gavin, assistant hotel manager, vigorous atheist and man with a sad secret in his past. Maybe it’s the writing, maybe it’s the absence of a motorbike and leather chaps, whatever it is, but where Hunnam is impressive as the angel with a dirty face, Jax, in the television series Sons of Anarchy, all aggression and thuggish insouciance, in The Ledge he comes across either as a petulant kid – an overeducated little snot with too much knowledge or too little respect – or as some sort of adulterous Jesus.
Tyler is better, playing her retiring student/wife role with a degree of vulnerability and ambiguous charm. Best of all, however, is Patrick Wilson as the bible-bashing husband. He gives everyman Joe a real sense of buttoned-up menace that belies his nice guy facade. If only the rest of the film could’ve been so nuanced.
Almost as an afterthought, Terrence Howard – an actor of considerable and frequently wasted talent – makes his presence felt as the cop. It’s a fairly thankless role and much smaller than a performer of his worth deserves but there you go, another in the long list of small disappointments The Ledge provides.
In more skilled hands The Ledge really could have been something. A clever movie that covered a lot of ground intellectually, while still being a smart, nasty thriller. Instead it’s an also-ran, look forward to seeing it in the bargain bin in weeks to come.
The fact that Dream House leaves itself open to predictable barbs about the whole film being a nightmare or that the director must have been fast asleep when he was making it for the whole thing to come out so badly would be a lot harder to ignore if it weren’t for the fact that neither the stars nor Jim Sheridan cared for the film at all.
In fact, they hated it. So much so, in fact that the film’s stars, Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, refused to do any press promotion for it and Sheridan had the film taken off him by the producers and tried to have his name removed from the finished product.
To be honest, you can see why.
A psychological thriller that may or may not be about a haunted house, a vindictive psycho or a crazy man trapped in his own hallucination, Dream House is yet another “what if?” story for the week, as in “what if Jim Sheridan, a fine director with a track record for making good movies, had been allowed to make the film he wanted?” Unfortunately, it seems like we’ll never know.
Craig stars as Will Atenton, a successful New York literary editor who has just quit his job and walked out the door with a fat severance package and a book deal tucked neatly under his arm. He and his missus Libby (Weisz) have just moved out of the city to a well-heeled suburb to raise their adorable daughters in their newly-purchased dream house.
Despite outward appearances, however, all is not perfect and what begins with cute daughter No 1 seeing something spooky out the window leads Will to discover that his new pile was the site of a brutal murder-suicide just five years before.
But is everything odd that’s going on really the fault of the crazy killer, still on the loose and looking for revenge? Or is there something far creepier and more rotten going on?
Well if you’ve seen the trailer for this you’ll probably already know the answer, and if you haven’t, it’ll probably take you about 15 minutes to work out what Dream House’s big twist is. Suffice it to say, the grand reveal ain’t that grand and even less twisty. The aftermath, probably meant to be shocking, is more tedious and predictable than anything else.
Craig and Weisz do their best with slim pickings here – both are dependable performers who could add gravitas and a bit of spice to a project as bland as Tofu: The Movie, but it’s frustrating to see the pair hampered by a lazy unimaginative story.
As in The Ledge, Dream House’s supporting cast is both hugely talented and grossly neglected with Naomi Watts, Marton Csokas and Elias Koteas.
Much like Dream House’s all too brief flashes of quality, their appearances on screen are frustrating brief and tragically infrequent.