Movie Review: 'Secret In Their Eyes'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- It's easy to forget that Julia Roberts, in addition to her popularity and commercial viability through several decades, also won an Oscar (Erin Brockovich) and was nominated three additional times (Steel Magnolias, Pretty Woman, August: Osage County).
But it's easily recalled after sitting though Secret in Their Eyes.
Secret in Their Eyes is writer-director Billy Ray's loose adaptation of an Oscar-winning 2009 Argentine thriller that was based on a 2005 novel featuring a male protagonist, played in the remake by Ms. Roberts.
Roberts plays grief-stricken Jess, an FBI investigator based in Los Angeles whose heart is broken and world is shattered when her teenage daughter is raped and murdered.
When her former FBI partner, Ray, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, haunted by the case, returns to Los Angeles with new evidence thirteen years later, Jess sees it as a second chance to get justice and at least a measure of closure, even if the anti-terror ops working out of her office have other priorities – perhaps clashing priorities.
Their district attorney supervisor, Claire, played by Nicole Kidman, shares a mutual desire for closure with Ray, with whom she had an undeclared romantic relationship all those years back.
Billy Ray, an accomplished screenwriter whose brief but impressive directorial resume lists Shattered Glass and Breach, injects enough moral ambiguity into his screenplay to force viewers to shift allegiances throughout.
The script toggles back and forth between present and past, and flirts with preposterousness on more than one occasion – bravely or foolishly: you make the call. Meanwhile, it abandons several dangling plot points, but layers its narrative in a way that helps to preserve and protect the surprises it has in store.
One problem is that the heart-wrenching opening reels raise expectations to a level that the remainder of the film strains to match – and doesn't. Still, the film is never less than fully engrossing.
And current world events lend it a post-9/11 timeliness in the crucial plot thrust about anti-terrorism.
As for Roberts, she reminds us of her talent by disappearing into a role that calls for anything but her patented radiant smile.
In truth, Ejiofor and Kidman, who have minimal chemistry, get more screen time than Roberts, but we're never – even when she's off-screen for stretches – far from feeling Roberts' character's inexpressible pain.
So we'll investigate 2½ stars out of 4 for the intense Secret in Their Eyes, an uneven but absorbing noirish murder thriller about justice and revenge.
