SLEUTH v/s SLEUTH article
For a long time I had been wanting to watch Sleuth. Not the remake but the original starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. I finally did see it and the first thing that struck me was that how stupid can one be to consider a remake of this film. Sleuth's mainstay is the plot whose twists and turns keep playing in your mind for a long while after the film is over.
The second highlight lies in the casting which pits two stalwarts against one another. In many ways this combination even beats the DeNiro-Pacino pair which recently has delivered an unprecedented turkey. Agreeably, by casting Caine in the remake, this problem is mitigated to a large extent. Â But what about the plot? One viewing of the original Sleuth is all it takes to absorb it all. Repeating it makes no sense when the viewer knows what's going to happen in the end.
But first, let's talk about the original. Based on a play by Anthony Shaffer and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the entire concept behind Sleuth can be described as "the games people play". Olivier plays an aristocrat who has a fondness, nay, fetish for games. His entire mansion is full of dart boards, chess boards, miniature toy figurines, life-size figurines and many more such knick-knacks. What's more, the entrance to his house is through a carefully designed maze. And it is here that he meets Caine for the first time. They are cordial to begin with but soon come to the point - Caine is having an affair with Olivier's wife and wants to marry her. Which is just as well because Olivier wants out too. He comes up with a win-win plan whereby Caine has to steal the jewels in his safe and elope with the wife whereas Olivier will make money off the insurance. Simple enough, I thought. I was wrong. Â The second half the film moves on to a totally different plane. Revealing any more would be criminal.
The film starts off nicely and continues in this vein for a while. But the dialogue does not drip with as much British wit as I would have liked and after a while it started to drag a bit. My disappointment however, lasted only for ten minutes or so as the first twist in the tale came along. And after that it was relentless.
The remake has been directed by Kenneth Branagh and written by Harold Pinter. Expectedly, they have tried to make some radical changes to the original. For instance, Olivier's ‘˜player' is replaced by Caine's ‘˜voyeur' in the remake. The mansion which was earlier riddled with playthings is now strewn with close-circuit cameras.  So every moment Jude Law (enacting Caine's role from the original) makes can be viewed on display screens placed at convenient points. This robs the movie of its central theme of each character playing a game. Without the metaphorical set of the original, the viewer has to work a little bit more to understand what's going on. There is another major change to the second half which I cannot reveal without converting it to a spoiler.
While Caine does justice to his role, Jude Law is hardly a patch on Caine. Going over the top in many key scenes, he does not even look good as he normally does in his other films.
The choice is clear. If Sleuth is the movie you are planning to watch, make sure you don't get conned into renting the DVD of the remake. It looks pale, even if when you haven't seen the original.
