Cheap The Clearing (2004) (DVD) (Robert Redford, Helen Mirren, Willem Dafoe) (Pieter Jan Brugge) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Clearing (2004)

Disappointing Lives
There is a deep and profound sense of foreboding that permeates Pieter Jan Brugge's "The Clearing," which reminds me, in tone if not in execution, of George Sluizer's "The Vanishing": another film about a kidnapping. But unlike "The Vanishing", "The Clearing" is more interested in the kidnapee's (Robert Redford) family than in the kidnapping itself: particularly Helen Mirren's Eileen. And despite the presence of Redford and William Dafoe (as the kidnapper), it is Mirren's touching and sensitive performance that dominates and perfumes this film with her transcendent and refined performance.
The central story involving the actual kidnapping and the psychological battle between Dafoe and Redford is weak due to spotty writing but when Mirren is on screen "The Clearing" becomes transparent, concise and intelligent.

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Boring With A Horrible Ending
[Spoiler Alert]

The Clearing is about a goodie goodie rich guy(Robert Redford) who's kidnapped by a depressed, down and out guy(Willem Dafoe). The wife(Helen Mirrin) of the rich a$$ must stay strong as possible. During the kidnapping, the rich guy and the poor guy talk to each other and discuss how much they have in common and how much they don't.

This movie is boring, but most of it is interesting. Then there's the ending. The ending proves nothing except that there's no point to the whole film. Willem's character kills Redford's character and purposely gets caught. All the conversations, the crying, the depression, only to see the hero of sorts get killed. Redford should've known better. I'd expect Dafoe to pick a bad role(he played Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ), but he actually does good. The ending comes so quick that you never really figure out why Dafoe's doing this and why he waited all day to kill him.

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Total Disappointment
The whole plot of this movie can be summed up as follows: penniless guy kidnaps rich guy and penniless guy either kills or doesn't kill the rich guy (I won't spoil it for you by revealing which). That's really all there is to it. It's not a story at all, it's a collection of scenes, most of them pretty dull.

Like "Memento" and "21 Grams," this movie plays tricks with time: the scenes involving the wife don't run parallel in time to the scenes involving the husband. Presumably, the director did this to make a flat movie more interesting, but it didn't work. Presenting scenes out-of-synch is becoming trendy in Hollywood. I think the technique is already getting tired and is just "artsy fartsy," copy-cat nonsense that can't put a story there when no story exists to begin with.

Of the three principal performances, only Dafoe's is interesting and well-crafted. He out-classes the film and his fellow cast members. But, in the end, even his performance is sunk by the lack of good lines: the interplay between he and Redford during their interminable trek in the woods is a marvel of B-movie banality. Mirren sleepwalks through her role. Redford seems to have had plastic surgery around the eyes. Whatever the extent of the surgery, it has limited his ability to register normal facial expressions. Just what an actor needs to enhance his perfomance. On top of that, he still looks old and worn out despite the surgery. His performance mirrors the way he looks: tired.

The actors who play Reford's grown children are totally unconvincing. The guy who plays the son overacts embarassingly in certain scenes; it's as though he's determined to make this minor part vault him into a great Hollywood career. Only a bad director lets that happen. Note that the movie's director has no prior experience as a director, only as a producer.

A scene that Roger Ebert loved, involving Helen Mirren's confrontation with her husband's elicit girlfriend, just doesn't ring true. In real life, the girlfriend would have refused to answer the wife's intimate questions and would have simply told her to go to hell. This "affair subplot," by the way, leads nowhere and contributes nothing to our understanding of the Redford character or his marriage.

Another problem is characters behaving in inappropriate ways, which may have been a sloppy way of creating false "suspects" in the minds of the audience. Even if you mentally correct for the non-parallel time lines, you still have odd situations like Redford's wife and daughter cavorting in the pool, having birthday parties, or playing with their dog... all while knowing that Redford is in mortal danger.

Overall, this was dull, sloppy and surprisingly devoid of plot. What was Redford thinking?