Frears made his Hollywood debut with The Grifters<\/em>; before that he was working in his native England, most recently on Dangerous Liaisons<\/em>, another film with complicated power dynamics. He\u2019s never been an auteur in the classic sense, with a recognizable style or recurring themes. But that efficient sensibility makes him an unexpectedly good fit for the material here. In some ways, he\u2019s hustling as much as his central trio. Roy (John Cusack), Lily (Anjelica Huston), and Myra (Annette Bening) are all introduced on the make, sharing a slick split-screen \u2013 one of Frears\u2019s few flourishes. What these people mean to one another will be revealed slowly. For now, we simply watch them work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Roy is clearly the greenest, with his baby face and rickety self-confidence, which hangs off him like a shirt two sizes too big. He sticks to pulling cheap swindles in dives, switching tens for twenties to bilk bartenders out of change, at least until he gets a baseball bat to the gut. Lily has the calcified bearing of a pro, with her ice blonde wig and icier demeanor. She has a steady gig for a mob boss fixing races at the Baltimore tracks, skimming off the top of each take for herself. Later we\u2019ll learn she\u2019s Roy\u2019s mother; she had him as a teenager and used to pass him off as her kid brother. Myra is a confident swindler, reduced to passing off junk jewelry for cash, or her body in a pinch. She met Roy two months ago and thinks he\u2019s a matchbook salesman. Though none of them share a scene for over fifteen minutes, the collision course they\u2019re on is fated as Frears tightens them around one another like a noose. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For viewers accustomed to the hyper-stylized, self aware performance style of film noir, the varying registers of the three leads might come as a bit of a shock. Cusack, only a few years removed from his iconic turn in Say Anything<\/em>, embodies the sort of desperate flop-sweat that comes with wanting to prove oneself. There\u2019s the sense that the hard-boiled dialogue he\u2019s adopted doesn\u2019t come naturally to Roy. Decades before she actually played Gloria Grahame, Bening\u2019s effervescent work as Myra recalls that screen siren\u2019s unique charisma. Dressing this sex kitten in animal print is almost gilding the lily. The fact that she bears a passing resemblance to Roy\u2019s mother will eventually come into play, but Huston\u2019s emotional rigor mortis is a study in contrasts. It\u2019s the film\u2019s toughest role, where the flashes of vulnerability Lily shows come to seem like just another survival instinct she\u2019s honed. What ultimately unites them is that their disguises have become so ingrained that there may no longer be anything underneath. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The plot kicks into gear when Lily is dispatched to La Jolla and decides to stop in Los Angeles (which she pronounces with a hard \u201cg\u201d) to visit the son she hasn\u2019t seen in eight years. In Frears’s rendering, the city\u2019s abundant sunshine only serves to lengthen its shadows. The usual designators of glitz and glamor are nowhere to be found. Until a computer shows up during a late second act sequence, it\u2019s not even clear what time period The Grifters<\/em> exists in. Thompson\u2019s source novel was published in 1963, and screenwriter (and fellow crime writer) Donald E. Westlake wisely doesn\u2019t stray far from it. Where era markers like the Cold War or McCarthyism once stood in for societal decay, Frears and company coat their story\u2019s nihilism with a distinctly late-capitalist sheen; the freelance scraping of the main characters will be recognizable to any gig worker. Meanwhile the action is goosed along by an Elmer Bernstein score that recalls the work Bernard Hermann did for Hitchcock more than the synths and electric guitars of the decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To reveal too much of what happens wouldn\u2019t be sporting, but suffice to say, an early line of dialogue dropped by Roy\u2019s mentor is key: \u201cGrifters got an irresistible urge to beat a guy who\u2019s wise.\u201d The best scores come from outsmarting the guy who thinks he\u2019s outsmarted you. Once Myra and Lily meet and clash over Roy\u2019s future prospects, the trio\u2019s deadly dance takes on the contours of a Greek tragedy, down to the incestuous undertones that come suddenly, and horribly, to the surface. There\u2019s only one direction for this story to end, and as the final character standing rides an elevator that might as well be going to Hell, we\u2019re left with the unshakeable knowledge that they\u2019re already there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The Grifters” is out now<\/a> on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/grifters2-1024x576.jpeg\")
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