Edward Burns in James Foley's Confidence: Straight Man - Page 3

Still, Burns is the star here, though opposite him Rachel Weisz comes off better because her character has to range more widely for the purposes of the grift. In the scene in which Burns recruits her for the job, there's a Wicked-Witch-of-the-West-green light on her face as she comes on to Burns and tells him to fuck off at the same time. She's no gang moll; Burns chooses her because of her skill at picking pockets, and she turns out to be a talented con, too. Weisz, who resembles Elizabeth McGovern and has a hint of Joan Cusack's cartoony wiliness, makes her impersonations--of a law student's wife especially--almost as funny as sketch characters. You sense the trickster's pleasure in putting the world on while the actress suggests that the person inside there somewhere wants to please Burns.

Foley's direction is thankfully swift. There's involuted narration--we think we're at the end of the line when we're still in the middle of a game--and Foley keeps it all moving with fast wipes from scene to scene. I was never bored, except to the extent that I'm not tempted by economic crime and, unlike the characters, don't feel any thrill in pulling off a big imposture. (I prefer the fantasy of total idleness to that of criminal work, which requires as much time and application and skill as legal work with all the energy given to evading detection added on top.) I also think that to the extent there are holes in the plot (Burns pulls a sting on a guy after revealing to him the details of an identical one) they don't matter. That is, if you're noticing the plot holes then it's probably because the movie isn't engaging you in any other, arguably more important, ways.

Confidence is an exhibition of fancy card-shuffling with no pretensions to more. So it makes Neil Jordan's The Good Thief look like a masterpiece because of that movie's stylistic forms of "more" (though there turn out to be other, more advanced, limitations). (If you really want more in an entertaining movie about conmen, check out Stephen Frears's 1990 movie The Grifters, starring Anjelica Huston, John Cusack, and Annette Bening.) But the kinds of "more" you get with a big-studio product like The Sting, the kinds that money can buy, leave me indifferent.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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