Deception movie review & film summary (2008)
But when Jonathan accidentally picks up Wyatt's cell phone after an intimate lunch in the park, he finds himself on a do-call list that would be the envy of every nascent Eliot Spitzer. Hot Wall Street babes begin calling him (well, really Wyatt) for anonymous sex at snazzy New York hotels. Oh, why not? Once he gets into the groove and gets Charlotte Rampling to explain the very simple rules to him ("No rough stuff and no names"), he takes to sexual moonlighting like a whore to culture.
If you check out the definition of the word "deception" in a dictionary, you'll find that it involves duplicity, a ruse, a trick. And therein lies the trouble with this movie. O, "Deception," where is thy deceit? Do you believe that Hugh Jackman is terrifying and sinister, and that Ewan McGregor is as timid as a wee fluffy bunny until he starts mating like one? The plot may say "yes," but your gut probably says "no." You see it on the screen, the story insists it's happening, but you do not believe it for a second. Indeed, "Deception" contains not one credible moment. Not one. Not a line, a gesture, a look, a staging, a situation, a location. Nothing. Even Madrid is unconvincing as itself -- and it's Madrid!
Likewise, the movie's New York is as lovely as the women in the montage sequences, but they all look artificial, although they are gorgeously photographed by Dante Spinotti ("Heat" (1995), "L.A. Confidential," "The Insider"). Stanley Kubrick had solid aesthetic reasons for making sex and the city look dreamlike and unreal in "Eyes Wide Shut." Here the flashing breasts are as carefully exposed as the lighted windows in the skyscrapers. They're fleetingly pretty, but are supplied for decoration only.
Long after "Deception" should have been over, the "twists" keep on coming. Most memorable is a transition from a closeup of a plastic wind-up duckie to a long shot of a seagull. That one I did not see coming. Everything else is equally risible, made all the more so by the filmmakers' determination to nail down every last painstakingly delineated plot point while ignoring the great black holes of story and characterization that long ago rendered it all so very pointless.
