Deception: No one sees it coming but the viewer
Release date: 25 April 2008
By Jerilyn Covert
“Intimacy without intricacy.” That’s how one character in the film Deception explains The List, an anonymous sex club for wealthy, high-powered New York businesspeople. Unfortunately, the description aptly sums up the movie, as well. Deception is 108 minutes of hard entertainment, but the plot’s as transparent as lingerie. As the title would suggest, the story hangs upon the elaborate lies of conmen. But by now, we moviegoers have seen just about every twist ending imaginable, and we’ve become pretty savvy. It takes a lot to surprise us, and this movie just isn’t all that tricky. The only trick, perhaps, is that the movie promises to trick us. And it–you know–doesn’t.
Nevertheless, the movie (directed by Marcel Langenegger) does offer some solid acting, fun dialogue, and hearty sex scenes making for an engaging journey, even if you can see every turn in the road from a fair mile away. For us, the lies may be thinly veiled, but the protagonist Jonathan McQuarry (Ewan McGregor) is more easily swayed. A quiet but successful accountant, Jonathan moves from one corporate client to the next, performing two-week audits and watching strangers pass by like fish in a fishbowl. Lonely and a little bit sad, Jonathan immediately is drawn to Wyatt Bose (Hugh Jackman), a charismatic lawyer who encourages him to loosen up and have fun. In the company of his newfound friend, Jonathan finds himself opening up, smoking up, and having an all-around good time.
When he and Wyatt accidentally switch cell phones, Jonathan stumbles upon the secret sex club and, thus, an exciting new way to spend his off hours. Suddenly, a bout of unattached, unbridled passion is always just one anonymous phone call away. His previous sexual frustration transforms into sexual liberation. And Jonathan is quickly swept up into this fabulous, illicit world where debauchery abounds, and no consequences ensue. The rules are fairly straightforward: No rough stuff, no business talk, and no names. But Jonathan messes up. He falls for someone–a beautiful young blonde, played by a seductive Michelle Williams, whom he knows nothing about save that the first letter of her name begins with an S. Of course, that makes it very difficult to describe her to the police when she mysteriously goes missing.
A few blackmails, murders and double crosses later, the film has lapsed from a potentially intriguing sociological look at a compulsive, impersonal, sex-obsessed culture (a la American Psycho) to a dime-a-dozen heist flick in which everyone is deceived but us the viewers. Ideally, the story should have been framed entirely within the sex club, rather than around it; the psychological edge, the nature of desire, and the search for meaning in a stale work-obsessed culture–that’s where the film really shined, in my opinion. If only someone could have seized on those themes.
Alas, no one did. So we’re left with a movie that has good parts (the first half) and disappointing parts (the second half). Ultimately, you’ll have to decide for yourself which parts outweigh the others. Overall, it was sexy, intriguing, fun–and painfully predictable. You know what I mean: intimate, but not intricate.