amedia

We got Flawless free from Jaman on our TiVo.

This movie starts out rather drab and dull, then gets very interesting. Unfortunately it's got plot holes you can drive a truck through, and while it pretends to address gender issues, it really whiffs on the chance to explore them meaningfully.

As an aside, one of the important secondary characters is played by Derren Nesbitt, who was in a memorable episode of UFO called "The Man Who Came Back," which also starred a post-Rat Patrol Gary Raymond.

Aside from a brief framing device, the movie is set in 1960. Demi Moore plays a junior executive - and the only female executive - at a diamond company (a thinly disguised British version of De Beers). She is constantly passed over for promotion because she's a woman. She comes up with a brilliant idea to solve a crisis quietly behind the scenes and is praised by her bosses, but then learns that they are going to fire her so that only senior management will know of the plan, and that she will be blackballed so that she can't work in the industry or for any business her employer deals with (which is pretty much *every* business in town). WTF???!!!! First of all, are they STUPID? If they want to keep the secret confined to senior management, they need to either promote her or shoot her, not ship her out into the world disgruntled and unemployable so she can spill what she knows (a political hot potato) to everyone who will listen. Second, it has nothing to do with her gender - they would have done the same thing to any junior exec. True, she's still junior because she's a woman, but I was hoping for something more directly gender-related. Frankly, other than not getting promoted, she's shown as being treated with professionalism and respect - I saw more sexual harassment in three minutes of a rerun of Airport 1975 on TV earlier today than in that entire movie. (That sounds like I was rooting for her to be harassed, and I wasn't; I just thought the movie seemed to be going one place and it stalled out in that direction.)

Anyway, because she's bitter about being passed over and about the plans to fire her, she joins forces with the janitor, played wonderfully by Michael Caine, who has a plan to rob the diamond vault and needs her help. It takes a really long time to get to the cool, exciting, diamond-theft part, and then there's a really good twist and things are actually interesting for a while.

I have three more complaints but they are REALLY spoilery. On the other hand, you can do a lot better things with two hours of your life than watch this movie, so feel free to read on. They have to do with the framing device, in which a made-up-unconvincingly-to-look-older Moore is talking with a young reporter in the present day about her experiences.

Problem 1: In the beginning, she says something about how this is her first time back in that city "as a free woman," so we think she got caught and went to jail. Throughout the movie this generates a cheap false suspense, as we keep wondering how she is going to get caught, but it turns out that she actually means something else: at the end, we learn that the janitor gave her all the money he earned from ransoming the diamonds back to the company - he did it for revenge, not profit - and it's taken her forty years to donate it all to charity. She didn't consider herself "free" until she spent all the money.

Problem 2: We get a photo montage of her visiting starving people in Africa and doing other charity work, juxtaposed with close-ups of checks that she's writing and signing with HER REAL NAME. Isn't anyone is going to ask where the hell a junior executive who quit her job shortly after a big diamond heist just happened to come up with a hundred million pounds to give away?

Problem 3: That photo montage... in addition to photos of her as a happy do-gooder traveling the world and funding worthy charities, there's a photo of her with a husband and children, and the older Moore is wearing a wedding ring. So. It's NOT ENOUGH to be a world-traveling philanthropist; if a woman wants to be fulfilled, she has to get married and produce offspring. Like I said earlier, they really whiffed on the gender issues.