...may not be the most exciting or well-focused drama of the year, but it manages to engage our intellect most of the time and keep us guessing well up to the end.
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Robert Redford doesn't make as many movies as a lot of stars, and the last few he has made have not all been howling successes. He obviously doesn't need the exposure, so maybe he keeps going to prove to his fans he's still alive and well. Or to himself. In any case, his latest venture, 2004's "The Clearing," may not be the most exciting or well-focused drama of the year, but it manages to engage our intellect most of the time and keep us guessing well up to the end.
One thing that can be said for Redford is that he is aging well. Not only does he still look good for his years, he's playing characters with solid dramatic content rather than the sex appeal of his youth. In "The Clearing" he plays a rich, middle-aged business executive of a rather ordinary nature who finds himself in a most extraordinary situation. He is kidnapped and held for $10,000,000 ransom.
Like the other main characters in the film, we find out little about Redford's Wayne Hayes beyond a perfunctory history. He's a self-made man, the former head of a successful car-rental agency; he's got a wife and two grown children; he's got a fancy home in the country; and he's carrying on an affair with a past employee. Now, in most cases it's good to know a lot about the victim in a mystery in order for the story to generate more suspense. If we feel compassion for the victim, we worry him or her more. But in this case, the screenwriter purposely keeps us distant from the man. Perhaps the writer knows that if we are too sympathetic with a character played by a famous movie star, we won't worry so much that he'll come to harm. We expect sympathetic characters played by famous movie stars to survive the day. So, in "The Clearing" anything can happen, and it keeps us more on edge.
Eileen Hayes, the wife, is played by Helen Mirren. Eileen is even harder to figure out than her husband. She is at first icy and aloof, seeming to dominate her husband. Then we learn that she is aware of her husband's affair. Does she still love him, or could she be a part of the kidnapping plot herself?
And there's the kidnapper, Arnold Mack, played by Willem Dafoe. He is the opposite of Hayes; he's a drab, middle-class loser, a guy out of work and out of luck. He tells Hayes he's doing this job for the money, delivering Hayes to a cabin deep in the woods where he'll drop him off for others. But along the way, Mack reveals to Hayes a good deal more personal information about himself. Would he do this if he knew Hayes were going to come through the ordeal alive? Or is he just overly friendly, or simply slow-witted? Mack uses "Please" and "I'm sorry" a lot, as though he had never committed so serious a crime before. Is it part of an elaborate charade to confuse Hayes? I kept seeing Mack, with his hangdog look, being played by William H. Macy, but Dafoe brings a greater element of threat to the part; his demeanor is a shade more sinister than Macy could probably convey.
"The Clearing" is not an action-adventure movie; it's primarily a character study, with its characters deliberately hard to figure out. Secondarily, it's a police procedural, the FBI attempting to track the kidnapper(s) and generally showing us they know less about what they're doing than the wife does. Thirdly, the movie is a marital drama, interestingly, one where the couple is hardly seen together except in flashback.
Most fascinating about the film, however, is the relationship that develops between the Redford and Dafoe characters in the woods. Mack tells Hayes a good deal about himself and his disappointments in life. Then, as things progress, Hayes appears to be dominating Mack, telling him what to do and taking what appears to be control of the course of events.
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