Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The makers of this plotty, glossy thriller have based their work on an excellent, dark novel by Patricia Highsmith. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't even come close to representing Highsmith's carefully constructed murky little world. The main problem - apart from the over-egged art direction and false, icon-ridden recreation of the mid-1950s - is the characterisations. In Highsmith's original, the main character of Walter (Patrick Wilson, on good form) and his relationship with his neurotic wife, Clara (Jessica Biel, lost) is complex and fascinating. As is the relationship between Walter and his new amour, Ellie (in the book she's a modest, sincere music teacher; in the movie she's a phoney hipster, singer). The movie relationships are diluted to the simplest terms, as though this were a trailer for what they could be. The most sinister character ( well-portrayed by Eddie Marsan), Walter Kimmel, is simply sinister without any exploration of his relationships with anyone else or his view of the world. Most of Highsmith's plot is intact, but rather than moan on about this travesty, I suggest you read the book, "The Blunderer", it's excellent on so many levels.

Very ironic that it was based on a novel called "The Blunderer" as it was a mess at every turn.I'm guessing but being that they somehow had the authentic locales, wardrobe and the shockingly numerous vehicles of the times, tried to build a movie around those. Or just didn't care about anything else. Even that failed as there were countless wide shots that should have been nice but just didn't work. The broad strokes were the actual direction that only essentially employed wide shots of interactions between characters with very few close-ups when close-ups are what these "noirs" rely on most. A vast majority of the dialogue and plot were delivered in a matter-of- fact way that completely ignored subtleties and nuances. Eddie Marsan and Vincent Kartheiser at least made a half-hearted attempt to act while the rest of the cast and leads essentially walked through the piece.(Being that the whole thing was delivered in a very flat manner and the prevalence of foreign money in films, I have to speculate that had an influence as some foreign films have that kind of storytelling. Further research showed it had Japanese, Philippine, Singapore, Middle Eastern and German money behind it. But there was a very stark example of such in a movie called Child of God by James Franco and had a prevalent Chinese company, Well-Go USA, behind it. It, too, was a period piece in the 50s South but extremely esoteric and the last thing you'd think Chinese audience would relate to. And of course the obvious Marvel and Transformers films.)Even the snow was bad as it often had a snow effect but none to very little snow on the ground. Jumping to the end, it also ignored the tried and true rule about this genre. The killer is always the one you least expect. But no, it was the first person you expected and was completely devoid of being clever. And it never answered the question about the Biel's death. I GUESS it was suicide although never clarified such. We are introduced to Wilson's eventual love interest Bennett in a completely non-dramatic way. He is not shown to be smitten or awestruck. She just---appears. They have a conversation and she leaves. Biel is jealous.And then the rest was just sloppy nonsense. We see the killer obviously set up an alibi by making himself known to the kid in the movie theater. He then leaves and it looks like he's up to no good. In all but this movie, that turns out to be a red herring. But here? No. He is actually the bumbling killer who ended up murdering his wife in a very sloppy and public way. Then we see a few scenes where the killer and the kid seem to have some sort of arrangement or agreement about all this. In vague terms, the kid is on the killer's side. But does he know the killer is actually the killer? Just bumbling nonsense.Bennett then shows with the potted planet and seems to flirt with an uninterested Wilson, who then shows up at her singing gig. It's at THAT point that we see he is smitten. For a very long time we do not see either Wilson or Bennett together whatsoever. No reason to think anything has happened. Biel insists that she followed her husband to Bennett's apartment. (In what? They have one car. She took the bus to her mother's house.) I got the impression that she was just crazy as we the audience did not see any further interaction between the two.But no. That did in fact happen as we find out much later in flashback.Wilson follows Biel on the bus and loses her somehow and we are never told how. He quickly makes himself known to a witness but lies about it to the detective later. Even though the detective easily finds out Wilson is lying, Wilson continues to lie (about the bookseller/murderer) coupled with being very obvious about his new girlfriend and telling everything to his supposed best friend.And where did Bennett hide in Wilson's house when the detective showed up?Frustrated and at the end of his rope, the detective then somehow enrages the killer with a feeble argument about class-ism so the killer then can go after Wilson. Sure enough, the killer does that and, for some reason, chases Wilson out of a very public bar and into the shadowy catacombs that were apparently adjacent and very accessible to this bar. Police of course close on their tails.A little point about wearing glasses, which the killer did. The cop crushed the glasses under his foot (off-camera) and the killer was without his coke bottle specs. But this didn't seem to slow him down one bit. Anybody who wears glasses would call BS on this one.Miss it. Don't waste your time unless you like laughing at bad film making.

This film tells the story of a successful writer, who is married to a beautiful wife. His wife is unfortunately intensely jealous, and their marriage is in jeopardy. When his wife is found dead, a detective relentlessly tries to prove that he is the murderer."A Kind of Murder" starts off engaging, as the wife is really beautiful. Jessica Biel's hairstyle is very elegant and elaborate, highlighting her status as a rich wife and successful designer. However, her attitude towards her husband is cold and unsupportive, making me feel very sorry for the husband. After the mysterious circumstances occurred, the story unfortunately goes downhill. The detective keeps on jumping to illogical and unsubstantiated conclusions, and his dedication towards the case is seriously misplaced. The involvement of the bookstore owner just doesn't make sense either. The ending creates confusion rather than suspense and thrill, which is a pity.

Andy Goddard's A Kind of Murder aspires to be a feminist detective thriller (adapted by screenwriter Susan Boyd from Patricia Highsmith's 1954 novel The Blunderer). But the film, set in 1960s New York, seems far more interested in its art design then in fully developing the story's underlying sexual ethics. Even the casting suggests that its producers hope to benefit from the nostalgia generated for that time and place by Mad Men: One of that show's principal actors, Vincent Kartheiser, plays the film's sleuth, Detective Lawrence Corby, who tries to unravel the mystery surrounding two women found dead at the same suburban bus station several weeks apart.The film opens with the first murder, that of the wife of an unprepossessing bookstore owner, Mr. Kimmel (Eddie Marsan), whom Corby suspects of committing the crime. The murder also captures the attention of Walter Stackhouse (Patrick Wilson), a successful architect and amateur writer of detective mysteries. Stackhouse does some investigation of Kimmel on his own, and in the process implicates himself in the second murder. Stackhouse works in the city and lives in the suburbs with his paranoid and depressive wife, Clara (Jessica Biel). Sexually frustrated as a result of her various neuroses, Stackhouse meets a seductive young jazz singer, Ellie (Haley Bennett), thus setting into motion the film's nourish romantic subplot.As I've mentioned beforehand, the film doesn't fully develop the story and it's underlying sexual ethics, rather it seems more interested in its art design.The central murder mystery is handled without much aplomb or ingenuity. Corby is a clumsy dick, and his investigation plays out like a humourless parody of a detective film. Albeit exquisitely packaged, A Kind of Murder is mostly a paint-by-numbers genre piece that only flares into life when exploring issues of sin, guilt, and punishment in relation to masculine sexual urges. As in many film Noirs, murder here is explicitly linked to thwarted lust. The film takes the standard Christian condemnation of adultery that leads fornicators to the jailhouse or the grave in most Noirs and endows it with a feminist twist. The biblical exhortation against lusting after another woman becomes here a critique of male sexual license in America on the eve of the sexual revolution.This appropriation of Christian morality for feminist ends is illustrated by Stackhouse's relationship with Ellie. She's the Eve to his Adam, tempting him away from his well-lighted, idyllic suburban home to a dimly lit underground jazz club in Greenwich Village. But the film emphasises her neutrality in this process, pointing out that it's Stackhouse's prerogative that sets the affair in motion. While Ellie is a willing participant in the drama, she's far from the sexually assertive she-devil that Clara makes her out to be. This emphasis on Stackhouse's culpability and refusal to judge Ellie captures America's evolving morality during that period, when Eisenhower-era family values were giving way to a greater emphasis on sexual liberation and gender equality.The film's muted cinematography coincides with the ethical murkiness of Stackhouse's behaviour as he journeys from the paradise of sacred matrimony to the hell of infidelity. His symbolic castration by Clara causes him to stray in his heart before he does so with his body, and the film's denouement reveals this to be a tale of feminist revenge from beyond the grave masquerading as a Christian parable about the dangers of carnal desire outside of marriage. As Stackhouse sits in his firm's office beneath an abstract expressionist painting, perplexedly trying to rationalise his immoral behaviour to his business partner, the art's wild, swirling colours hint at the moral revolution soon to be unleashed upon the nation and the confusion it would sow in its wake.