plug: The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)
"Do you want to dance? Or do you want to DANCE?"
Since we started Evil Sexy Hamlet my main bag has been plugging a lot of “old” movies through a 2020 lens, parsing out prophetic morsels of enlightening catharsis for the current diabolical shit show of American life (recent examples: Death Race 2000 as “Trumpsploitation” and Performance as a hallucinatory “quarantine movie”). I do this because I find it immensely helpful and comforting, as much as anything has the power to be comforting these days. Perhaps in a realer sense than any other art form, movies are dreams captured by technology and brought into waking life. As such they can provide both personal and communal insight into life's burdens, and sometimes even alleviate them.
Movies can also be pure escapist entertainment, the potency of which has only ever been matched by video games. And as much as I crave that journey through the electric looking glass where the inner and outer life pass through each other in a kaleidoscopic haze, I've found myself wanting to tune out and be taken for a ride more and more often. We all need art that stimulates our understanding, and we all need pure comfort food. So as I ping-pong between the two in my own viewing habits, I’ll probably be doing the same with these plugs for the foreseeable future.
Anyway, today’s plug is of the escapist entertainment variety, and a recent re-discovery that I found 100% delightful.
The Thomas Crown Affair is a 1999 remake of a 1968 romance caper starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. In the OG, Thomas Crown (McQueen) is a playboy businessman who orchestrates a bank robbery in his spare time. The remake subs in Pierce Brosnan (at the height of his Bond powers in ‘99) for McQueen, and the bank robbery plot is replaced with an elegant, entertaining, and oddly moving art heist.
I still haven’t seen the original so I can’t speak to whether or not the remake is “better” or “worse,” but I can speak to the genius of choosing to center the plot of the new one around an art heist because it’s solid ground for director John McTiernan (Predator, Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October) to do some of the most elegant work of his siiiick career. McTiernan’s films usually walk a tight rope between visual elegance and blunt, masculine action-flick bravado. The Thomas Crown Affair sees him cranking the elegance dial all the way up, setting the stage for a smart, sexy, classic cat-and-mouse romance, the likes of which you really don’t see in movies today.
I’ve seen some debate online as to whether or not Brosnan and co-star Rene Russo have enough chem in this movie. To me, there’s no debate to be had. Their chemistry is fucking electrifying. The age-appropriateness of their romance has truly aged like a fine wine, as has the equality of their emotional dynamic throughout the film. This is a ridiculous Hollywood confection with a ridiculous plot and plenty of unintentional humor that inevitably comes with ‘90s film tropes that are no longer in fashion and at no point am I not 100% believing it because the movie is grounded in the work that Brosnan and Russo are doing to make their romance the biggest special effect on screen.
Separately, they’re both c-r-u-s-h-i-n-g it as well. As a lifelong Bond fan, I’ve always had a soft spot for Broz, the Bond of my childhood and an actor whose singular charisma and graceful screen presence have always been somewhat underappreciated. His talents have never been more perfectly utilized than they are in Thomas Crown. I tried to go back and find it and couldn’t but I recall scrolling upon a tweet weeks ago that went something like “What is Pierce Brosnan’s best Bond movie and why is it The Thomas Crown Affair?” and I think that about sums it up. Brosnan gives the character the same veneer of ‘90s metro, cat-like cool that he gave Bond, but underneath that is a more three-dimensional and infinitely more vulnerable, emotional person. It’s his pinnacle role for sure.
Then there’s Russo, who can completely steal the show while also elevating the performance of whoever she’s working with in a way that’s so authentic and casual and unique to her. Russo’s character, Catherine Banning (lit movie name) is an insurance investigator assigned to Crown’s art heist, equally invested in his capture as she is in the thrill of the chase.
It’s that second part that opens the door to the cat-and-mouse romance that occurs immaculately in tandem with the mounting investigation. Brosnan sets the elegant tone at the beginning of the film, but when Russo shows up, the movie becomes even cooler and more bombastic. It shifts to her energy. Watch this clip and you’ll see what I mean.
There are several scenes like this where Brosnan comes in cool as a cucumber and handsome as all fuck and Russo just “out-Bonds” him with the heavy vibes she’s putting out. Fucking tremendous.
The Thomas Crown Affair is a beautiful, clever, garish, delightfully absurd Hollywood version of that thing at the beginning of a relationship when two people start to let each other in but they're also still trying to be the coolest, sexiest version of themselves. It's the type of big-screen entertainment for adults that might still have something of a life on cable but hasn't existed in the contemporary consciousness for what seems like ages. I used to catch snippets of it on TNT as a kid but never kept enough interest to watch it all the way through because I guess it lacked the adolescent qualities of a Bond movie. It was a blast to rediscover a few weeks ago when my wife and I sat down to knock something fun off our streaming queue. I think it might be one of our movies now, and those are always a thrill to find.