7-29-10 Movie Review: The Secret in Their Eyes

Two noncommercial screen offerings tonight, one Sunday afternoon, then one more Tuesday night. Tonight features the last of the Al Fresco series, The Sting, with seven Oscars, including best movie of 1973, with Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Robert Shaw, and the music of Scott Joplin in an elaborate swindle story with a surprising PG rating; that’s at the Brickyard, 129 North Rock Island, 8 tonight. And tonight’s other show is part of a new series, of big-screened stage plays from New York and England, beginning tonight with 1941’s classic London Assurance, an Oscar-Wilde kind of comedy with characters like old lecher Sir Harcourt Courtly and Lady Gay Spanker, in a production by the Royal National Theatre, on screen in the Murdock Theatre, 536 North Broadway, tonight at 6:15. Then Sunday afternoon, by a similar arrangement with Metropolitan Opera, the Murdock presents maybe the most popular opera ever, Bizet’s Carmen, at 2:30. And finally, Tuesday night, the League of Women Voters will show Nancy Landon Kassebaum’s 85th-Anniversary celebration of the 19th Amendment, in Wichita in 2005, at 6:30 in the Downtown Senior Center, 200 South Walnut, one block south of Douglas, one east of Seneca.

And commercially, we have a rare subtitled movie, from Argentina and in Spanish, The Secret in Their Eyes, and while its subtitles will probably doom it to a short run, it’s a rare treat for lovers of grownup detective stories.

Basically, The Secret in Their Eyes is made up of a lot of the old well-loved ingredients of the mystery story: it has the Dirty-Harry kind of semilegitimate police hero, who is still more admirable than the foully corrupt system that is always threatening to take away his badge; he has the customary semicomic sidekick and the girl friend he is at odds with at the moment. He is investigating his last case and is determined to solve it before he quits, and it is the murder of a beautiful woman. The case is dead and closed and nobody wants him to look into it, so he has to do it on his own time. His methods are such that we might wonder how he could ever get a case into court. His whole world is grubby and unattractive; you wouldn’t want to live there. But it is the every-popular world of film noir.

And The Secret in Their Eyes treats all these elements in unconventional ways. For one thing, our hero does not seem to be anything wonderful as a cop. He has admirable determination to keep his promise to solve the case and get justice for the victim, but his semicomic sidekick seems to be smarter than he is, and his girl friend is a better interrogator, though you may not care a lot for her method. The reason nobody wants him snooping is surprising, and the end of the whole sordid affair is really surprising, and really tops the whole story.

And what is as surprising as any of these things, the story turns out to be quite logical and believable, although, what is not surprising, it sent me off after a red herring the way mystery stories are supposed to do: I suspect that you might not be so misled, because I misread a clue in a way more subtle than The Secret in Their Eyes, which is pretty realistic, calls for. There is a cynicism that is more appropriate than attractive, and you might not like the characters. But don’t let the subtitles turn you away, because Hollywood doesn’t make’em like this anymore.