Slight Case Of Murder (DVD)

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During the past three decades, William H. Macy has established himself as one of Hollywood's best and most-recognized character actors. He hasn't done much starring work or gotten a lot of credit, although his turn in "The Cooler" was terrific, and the Academy nominated him for a supporting role in "Fargo." He has one of those faces that seem ready-made for character work, full of hangdog expression, almost demanding sympathy but never finding it. I mention this because in the 1999 TNT original movie "A Slight Case of Murder" he had the chance to tailor a script to his own specifications, he and director Steven Schachter adapting a novel by mystery writer Donald E. Westlake to his personal needs. The result is a comedy-thriller that is really pretty nifty, with a topflight cast by television standards.

You may be familiar with Donald E. Westlake; he's published under a number of pseudonyms, most famously as Richard Stark, and he's written a number of things you may know, like the novel "The Hunter," which Hollywood turned into "Point Blank" and "Payback," and "The Busy Body," "The Outfit," "The Bank Shot," "The Hot Rock," "The Stepfather" films, and "Slayground," among many more. This one, "A Slight Case of Murder" (based on Westlake's "The Travesty"), should not be confused with the old Edward G. Robinson film of the same name, but both movies abound in black humor and use homicide as the underpinning for the merriment.

OK, you remember Bill Macy's character in "Fargo," the mild-mannered, all-American guy-next-door who tried to remain looking perfectly innocent while being guilty as sin. Same thing here. The film's biggest asset is watching Macy's character sweat. And we do this from the moment the movie begins to the very end. It's as though Macy said to himself, If I could do it in a supporting role, why not in a leading role? So instead of having a pregnant Frances McDormand upstaging him all the time, he's got the picture pretty much to himself, with a few good supporting actors around, just in case.

Macy plays Terry Thorpe, an acerbic, not-so-likeable movie critic with his own cable TV segment on a New York City news show. He is also a single fellow who is inexplicably romancing several beautiful women at the same time. The script never explains what draws these women to him (he's hardly a heartthrob), but, I mean, when you get to co-write your own script, why not? Or maybe it's because he's a movie critic; everybody knows that movie critics are notorious lovers.

When the story opens, Thorpe is in a woman's apartment, Laura Penney's; she is one of the women with whom he's having an affair. She is lying dead on the floor, having slipped, he tells us, on an ice cube and hit her head during a heated discussion concerning another of Thorpe's girlfriends, Kit Wannamaker (Felicity Huffman). What is Thorpe to do? If he calls the police, they might think he pushed her deliberately, implicating him as a murderer. Instead, he panics and runs, pretending he was never there.

Thorpe figures he's seen enough mystery movies to know every plot trick in the book and decides he'll use them to fool the police and provide himself with an alibi. But things are not as easy as they seem. They never are. Before you know it, a sleazy private eye, John Edgerson (James Cromwell), is blackmailing him; his other girlfriend, Kit, is getting suspicious of his strange behavior; a police detective, Fred Stapelli (Adam Arkin), investigating the case is also trying to get him to read the screenplay for a crime movie he's written; and Stapelli's wife, Patricia (Julia Campbell), has developed the hots for him. Nothing is easy.