Movie Review: 'A Bigger Splash'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- A quiet vacation being taken by a female rock star and a male moviemaker on a sun-drenched island in the Mediterranean is interrupted and radically changed into something scandalous and perhaps even criminal when they're visited by an ex of hers and his daughter.
Its intriguing premise notwithstanding, A Bigger Splash doesn't offer enough in the way of thrills to qualify as a thriller, with pacing so relaxed, it seems the filmmakers themselves were on vacation.
It's a loose English-language remake of the 1969 French film, The Swimming Pool, with sun and skin on foreground display and undeniably gorgeous scenery at every turn in the background.
Director Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love, Melissa P., The Protagonists), making his English-language debut, works from a screenplay by David Kajganish that's based on the story by Alain Page. He kicks off his film at a sold-out stadium rock concert, where Marianne Lane, played by Tilda Swinton, is in the process of belting out numbers until her voice gives out.
It does just that in time, which is why she and her documentarian lover, Paul, a recovering suicidal alcoholic played by Matthias Schoenaerts, are relaxing on a villa on Pantelleria, an island just off the coast of Sicily.
She's under doctor's orders, following vocal-cord surgery, to remain mute and rest her voice – if she wants her career to continue, that is.
But when her romantic ex and ex-record producer, Harry, played by Ralph Fiennes, calls, she cannot resist inviting him – and his twentysomething daughter, Penelope, played by Dakota Johnson, whom Harry didn't know existed until very recently – to visit and then stay with them.
It becomes clear pretty quickly that Harry, a manic motormouth of a hedonist and showoff who might as well be carrying an "All's Fair in Love and War" banner, is interested in winning Marianne back from Paul, which is ironic because it was Harry, Paul's best friend at the time, who introduced Marianne and Paul in the first place and virtually talked them into becoming a couple.
The psychosexual dynamic becomes even more perverse and dangerous once it is suggested that perhaps Harry brought his daughter along to distract Paul while Harry is doing his obsessive wooing of Marianne.
And, besides, how do we know for sure that she actually is his daughter?
So, with sexual tension cropping up everywhere, the erotic triangle suddenly morphs into a quadrangle.
A Bigger Splash, its title borrowed from a David Hockney painting, offers up the backstories of the four principal characters via flashbacks. This should have had the effect of making the film seem more character-directed. But that doesn't end up being the case.
There's just too much arbitrary behavior and a few abrupt tonal shifts, especially in the third act, when a corpse turns up in the pool in a plot thrust that seems jetted in from another movie, tacked on, and then rushed through: to describe the ambiguous ending as less than satisfying would be to severely understate the case.
Swinton, winner of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Michael Clayton, was apparently responsible for suggesting before production began that her character be virtually mute. So she does all her acting with her face and body. But, resourceful as she is, we feel cheated of a certain amount of character delineation.
And two-time Oscar nominee Fiennes (for Schindler's List and The English Patient), intent on showing us a side of him we haven't seen before - just as he did in his very funny turn in The Grand Budapest Hotel – spills well over the top in his reading of a manipulative and dismissive character.
He is, in a word, obnoxious.
Ditto, unfortunately, for the film itself.
So we'll dive in after 2 stars out of 4. A Bigger Splash is neither smash nor crash. Just brash.
