A Kind of Murder

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I have weighted the film on the lower side of 5 out of 10 for the abysmal ending. As with most movie buffs, we hate to get sucked into a somewhat film noir with plenty of mystery in the early going, only to have the film end rather abruptly without proper closure. Patrick Wilson who plays Walter Stackhouse, an architect/storyteller/amateur detective is superb in his role. Kudos also to the wardrobe department for their excellent choice for their 1950's period dressage. I also liked the performances by Jessica Biel and Eddie Marsan. I would try to explain my disappointment by likening it to the purchase of a double scoop of my favorite ice cream placed in a sugar cone only to have taken my first bite and find out the ice cream was sorbet and the sugar cone was actually cardboard. If you can picture that scenario, then that is what I felt I watched with "A Kind of Murder", more like "A Kind of a Let Down"

...'cos if I had I wouldn't have been led down the garden path to this movie's sinkhole of an ending.

It's the winter of 1960/61 in New York City. Bookstore owner Marty Kimell (Eddie Marsan) recently lost his wife Helen and police detective Lawrence Corby (Vincent Kartheiser) is investigating the murder. Successful architect and aspiring crime novelist Walter Stackhouse (Patrick Wilson) is obsessed with the murder. He and his socialite wife Clara (Jessica Biel) throw a party which is attended by beautiful nightclub singer Ellie Briess (Haley Bennett). He spends his spare time secretly writing his book which drives his wife into rages of jealousy over Ellie. It is a murder mystery based on a novel. Director Andy Goddard is more known as a TV director. He doesn't have the cinematic flare. The production style is lacking despite the 60s decor. He is supposed to be an architect and the house does not stand out enough. Wouldn't it be better if they have a stylish Manhattan apartment? Wouldn't that be a simpler set to dress? More importantly, Goddard's camera style is lacking. It looks like a TV movie. While it has the stuff of the era, it doesn't have the soul of the era. It doesn't have the noir murder mystery style that the story is so desperate to have. As for the murder mystery itself, it doesn't start until Clara's death well into the movie. It's too far and the movie becomes too slow in its built. The actors are fine but they're just wasting their time doing this movie.

Thrillers made prior to circa 1970 often began with a "hook" of some kind, followed shortly thereafter by an unspeakable event. The story would only gradually unfold in which the viewer has no idea the who, the what, the how, the pieces of the puzzle only fitting into place at great effort. Think of the Maltese Falcon: a beautiful woman enters into the detective offices of Sam Spade and Miles Archer, claiming she's trying to find her sister who has been supposedly abducted. Shortly thereafter, Archer is murdered. In "A King of Murder", based on a story by the mystery-suspense writer Patricia Highsmith, famous for her Ripley novels, there's a similar form. At the beginning of the film, we learn that the wife of a reclusive antiquarian bookseller, Marty Kimell (Eddie Marsan) has been murdered. We don't see the murder, but mainly hear about it through a newspaper clipping extracted from a newspaper by Walter Stackhouse, a prominent architect. The case is being investigated by Detective Lawrence Corby (Vincent Kartheiser of Mad Men fame). Then we're brought to the other story-line thread. Walter Stackhouse (Patrick Wilson) seems to have everything someone in the upper middle-class could desire: a beautiful home, a beautiful wife, and a promising career as an architect and a short story writer. Except, his relationship with his wife, Clara (Jessica Biel), is on the rocks because of a dwindled sex life. At one of their lavish parties Stackhouse meets Elli, and he triangulates to fulfill his sexual needs. He also visits the bookshop owned by the husband of the murdered woman. Clara's impotence worsens and so does her psychological instability. At the same time, the case of the murdered woman seems to be going nowhere. Eventually, Clara's mother is reported to be dying, and Clara leaves on a bus to go to her bedside. Stackhouse follows her but then returns home. Later, we learn Clara never arrived at her mother's. She was found dead under a bridge about half-way between her home and her mother's. Was it suicide or murder? Stackhouse is questioned by Corby who starts to believe there may be a link between Stackhouse, his dead wife, and the other murdered woman. When questioned about whether he knew about the other case, Stackhouse lies and says he's never heard of it, and claims he has never met the widower. Corby begins to question Stackhouse's claims. Will he be caught in his lies and therefore become a prime suspect in the death of his wife? A thoroughly enjoyable and biting suspense-thriller which has its roots in many of the noir films directed by Howard Hawks and John Huston. A positive reviewer quote states that the film would have made Hitchcock proud, but this is much more of a throw-back to adaptions of novels by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. "A Kind of Murder" is very gritty, similar to the "b-films" of Old Hollywood, such as "The Maltese Falcon", "Laura", and "The Big Sleep". And the climactic ending is not what you would expect from most of these kinds of films today.

Leave it to Patricia Highsmith to come up with implausible plots that somehow seem so possible. Based on her novel THE BLUNDERER, Susan Boyd has adapted this complex novel for the screen and Andy Goddard directs. Walter Stackhouse (Patrick Wilson) is a rich, successful architect/writer unhappily married to the beautiful but mentally damaged Clara (Jessica Biel). His desire to be free of her feeds his obsession with Kimmel (Eddie Marsan), a man suspected of brutally murdering his own wife outside the Rainbow Grill, a bus/truck stop out on the road. But when Clara is found dead in suspicious circumstances, Walter's string of lies and his own guilty thoughts (he has become involved with a young singer Ellie – played well by Haley Bennett) seem enough to condemn him. As his life becomes dangerously entwined with Kimmel's, a ruthless cop, Detective Corby (Vincent Kartheiser) is increasingly convinced he has found a copycat killer in Walter and aims to nail both murderers. The denouement stops a bit cold and the last portion of the story seems more than slightly implausible, but the turns the story takes make it a very classy thriller. Another aspect of the film that works well is the sets and costumes (vintage cars, crinolines, excessive smoking, etc) that clearly place this film in the 1960s. Even the selection of music by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans enhances the atmosphere. The fittingly dark atmosphere is well established by cinematographer by Chris Seager. For pure noir thriller in the vein of Patricia Highsmith's plot development this is a strong film that could be stronger with some significant editing.

A Kind of Murder, based on Patricia Highsmith's book The Blunderer, is a great looking set piece, a 1950's murder mystery, but it somehow feels kind of bland. The problem is lack of character development and an emphasis on style over substance. Stylistically, the film is beautiful, from the sets to the costumes to the great old cars. But Patrick Wilson, as the architect and part time mystery writer Walter Stackhouse, turns in a rather flat performance, so we don't really feel moved by his dilemma. Eddie Marsen, on the other hand, is suitably creepy as a seeming psychopath (did he actually kill his wife? No spoilers here). Jessica Biel, as Stackhouse's neurotic, suicidal wife Clara, is two dimensional. So are Haley Bennett as Wilson's illicit girlfriend and Vincent Kartheiser as the homicide detective on the case. Much of the dialogue is stilted and unrealistic. The mystery itself is intriguing enough (Hitchcock could have done wonders with this story), but the screenplay fails to make us care about the characters. Nevertheless, it keeps you watching, mainly because Highsmith was such a good writer. For a movie that is so focused on period, there is one major gaffe: In the nightclub scene, the drummer is playing a modern set of drums. I'm a musician, and I spotted it immediately. Director Andy Goddard should have been paying attention. An oversight like this suggests that he wasn't seriously vested in the film and was just collecting a paycheck. The film is not a disaster or even a failure; it's just not totally successful. Stream it for a mindless popcorn night.

Andy Goddard's A Kind of Murder aspires to be a feminist detective thriller (adapted by screenwriter Susan Boyd from Patricia Highsmith's 1954 novel The Blunderer). But the film, set in 1960s New York, seems far more interested in its art design then in fully developing the story's underlying sexual ethics. Even the casting suggests that its producers hope to benefit from the nostalgia generated for that time and place by Mad Men: One of that show's principal actors, Vincent Kartheiser, plays the film's sleuth, Detective Lawrence Corby, who tries to unravel the mystery surrounding two women found dead at the same suburban bus station several weeks apart. The film opens with the first murder, that of the wife of an unprepossessing bookstore owner, Mr. Kimmel (Eddie Marsan), whom Corby suspects of committing the crime. The murder also captures the attention of Walter Stackhouse (Patrick Wilson), a successful architect and amateur writer of detective mysteries. Stackhouse does some investigation of Kimmel on his own, and in the process implicates himself in the second murder. Stackhouse works in the city and lives in the suburbs with his paranoid and depressive wife, Clara (Jessica Biel). Sexually frustrated as a result of her various neuroses, Stackhouse meets a seductive young jazz singer, Ellie (Haley Bennett), thus setting into motion the film's nourish romantic subplot. As I've mentioned beforehand, the film doesn't fully develop the story and it's underlying sexual ethics, rather it seems more interested in its art design. The central murder mystery is handled without much aplomb or ingenuity. Corby is a clumsy dick, and his investigation plays out like a humourless parody of a detective film. Albeit exquisitely packaged, A Kind of Murder is mostly a paint-by-numbers genre piece that only flares into life when exploring issues of sin, guilt, and punishment in relation to masculine sexual urges. As in many film Noirs, murder here is explicitly linked to thwarted lust. The film takes the standard Christian condemnation of adultery that leads fornicators to the jailhouse or the grave in most Noirs and endows it with a feminist twist. The biblical exhortation against lusting after another woman becomes here a critique of male sexual license in America on the eve of the sexual revolution. This appropriation of Christian morality for feminist ends is illustrated by Stackhouse's relationship with Ellie. She's the Eve to his Adam, tempting him away from his well-lighted, idyllic suburban home to a dimly lit underground jazz club in Greenwich Village. But the film emphasises her neutrality in this process, pointing out that it's Stackhouse's prerogative that sets the affair in motion. While Ellie is a willing participant in the drama, she's far from the sexually assertive she-devil that Clara makes her out to be. This emphasis on Stackhouse's culpability and refusal to judge Ellie captures America's evolving morality during that period, when Eisenhower-era family values were giving way to a greater emphasis on sexual liberation and gender equality. The film's muted cinematography coincides with the ethical murkiness of Stackhouse's behaviour as he journeys from the paradise of sacred matrimony to the hell of infidelity. His symbolic castration by Clara causes him to stray in his heart before he does so with his body, and the film's denouement reveals this to be a tale of feminist revenge from beyond the grave masquerading as a Christian parable about the dangers of carnal desire outside of marriage. As Stackhouse sits in his firm's office beneath an abstract expressionist painting, perplexedly trying to rationalise his immoral behaviour to his business partner, the art's wild, swirling colours hint at the moral revolution soon to be unleashed upon the nation and the confusion it would sow in its wake.

It could have been a really great movie but it just lets you down over and over again. I get the whole 60's era, rainy/snowy nights but it's all about the scenery and nothing about the characters. I never understood the bullying behavior of the Detective, the "illness" of the wife or what exactly the Husband did. Was he a Writer or an Architect? Too many unanswered questions and not enough acting, but you get plenty of night-time scenery. I guess my biggest disappointment is the Damn plot or story line, I'm still confused.

This film tells the story of a successful writer, who is married to a beautiful wife. His wife is unfortunately intensely jealous, and their marriage is in jeopardy. When his wife is found dead, a detective relentlessly tries to prove that he is the murderer. "A Kind of Murder" starts off engaging, as the wife is really beautiful. Jessica Biel's hairstyle is very elegant and elaborate, highlighting her status as a rich wife and successful designer. However, her attitude towards her husband is cold and unsupportive, making me feel very sorry for the husband. After the mysterious circumstances occurred, the story unfortunately goes downhill. The detective keeps on jumping to illogical and unsubstantiated conclusions, and his dedication towards the case is seriously misplaced. The involvement of the bookstore owner just doesn't make sense either. The ending creates confusion rather than suspense and thrill, which is a pity.