Billy Ray’s (Breach, Shattered Glass) Secret In Their Eyes is a movie with a trailer that makes it look amazing. With an all-star cast that includes two Academy Award-winning actresses, a mystery/suspense/drama, and a murder of a teenage girl with close ties to the main character’s plot, this movie was sure to be a surefire hit, right? Not so fast. When the mixed reviews started rolling in, you had to wonder what was keeping this moving from being great. There were enough negative reviews that would have saved me from seeing this review or at least had me wait for a home viewing if I weren’t a person obsessed with seeing as many movies as possible in the theater. It turns out I could have easily waited for or maybe skipped it entirely. While entertaining, it’s not a movie that needs to be seen. When all is set and down, I can’t see this landing as even one of the 25 best movies I’ve seen this year. It wasn’t the most disappointing movie I saw this year because I had tempered my expectations, and it still held my interest the only time. However, it was very uneven, pretty far-fetched, and didn’t have an audience for it. I think these suspense/mystery/drama-type movies are losing their audiences (at least in terms of watching them in the theater). With the influx of superhero movies, Pixar and other excellent animated films, and more and more quality independents, movies like Secret In Their Eyes are slowly becoming a dying bread. Of course, there are exceptions, especially when a movie is excellent or win it is based on a book that just about everybody reads (see the astounding Gone Girl for both of these exceptions). But if a movie such as Secret In Their Eyes gets just average or even slightly average reviews, it’s just unlikely to do well in the theaters anymore, regardless of which stars are on it.
This movie is based on a 2010 Argentine film of the same name that won an Academy Award for the best foreign-language film back in 2010. The American version of the film features many changes, including the lead character being a woman (Julia Roberts – Pretty Woman, August: Osage County) and the murder of a child (Zoe Graham – Boyhood, Rudderless) rather than a spouse. Does that help or hurt it? It doesn’t do either. That’s not the problem with it. The main issues with the film, for the most part, aren’t even apparent until the final 15 minutes or so. But then these problems are entirely exacerbated as you go back and try to make sense of the story after the “secret” is revealed. You sort of feel stupid for not seeing it earlier and then fooled for believing that the movie could be something more. Likewise, the film was slightly miscast. Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave, The Martian) was fabulous as Ray, an FBI investigator in a Los Angeles-based Counter Terrorism Unit. This is his movie. He puts his heart and soul into it, and I can only imagine how awful I might have viewed if his character had been played by someone less driven. But there is a significant drop off from his performances to all of the others. I have read mixed reviews over Roberts’s performance of Jess, the grizzled FBI agent who is excellent at her job, has a fondness for her co-workers, and whose biggest concern in life is that her 18-year-old daughter Carolyn will be leaving the next to go across the country to attend college in just a few months. I’ll touch on this in a bit.
The movie flashes back and forth between the present day and 2002 (13 years earlier). Ray’s life has unraveled since the fateful day when he discovered Carolyn’s dead body in a dumpster outside of a nearby mosque. When a suspect named Marzin (Joe Cole – The Falling, Green Room) is apprehended following a pursuit by Ray and fellow agent Bumpy (Dean Norris – television’s Breaking Bad, The Counselor), he is released despite confessing to the crime in front of Ray and counter-terrorism prosecuting attorney Claire (Nicole Kidman – The Hours, Cold Mountain). Marzin is a pawn in a bigger scheme directly related to Ray, Jess, and Bumpy’s counter-terrorism unit. Carolyn’s death temporarily takes a backseat to potential benefits that Marzin can lead the team to. However, rather than keeping a set of eyes on him to continue what he was doing, Marzin evades surveillance and escapes into obscurity.
Flash-forward 13 years, and we see the same set of characters, though circumstances have changed them. Ray hasn’t been able to relax since letting Carolyn’s murderer slip away. He spends each night looking at profile pictures on his computer database to find out where this man is. When he finds a profile that he thinks might be Marzin, he brings it back to the team. The case isn’t reopened in fear that Marzin will slip through the cracks again. Instead, internal law enforcement resources are used to determine where this man is perceived to be Marzin. The question becomes whether they will get to this man, is this man who they think he is, and what will happen if they catch Carolyn’s killer. It’s a murder mystery that needs a twist to stay above the hundreds of other murder mysteries we’ve seen. And, of course, there is a twist. You might catch onto it right away. You might, as I did, grab onto it right before it happens. Or you might be blindsided by it. There are clues along the way that lead you in this direction, so it’s not like it just comes out of left-field. It’s ultimately left to each viewer to determine if the twist is plausible enough for them. If it is, you’ll like the movie. If it isn’t, as was the case with me, you’ll have a bit of a sour taste left in your mouth. While the clues are there, we don’t see how these characters have changed over the 13 years. We know that they have.
Ejiofor shines as Ray. The genuine smile we see in flashbacks of him, Jess, and Carolyn are permanently erased through a pair of eyes that confirm that the man we once knew died the moment he found Carolyn in the dumpster. He pours his heart into each scene, and, for me, he proved that his performance as Solomon Northup in 12 Years a Slave wasn’t a fluke performance. While he hasn’t received the best roles in his life, when given a chance, Ejiofor excels. Kidman’s performance as the attorney who does her best to check her emotions at the door was weak. Claire’s character just wasn’t fair to Ray. There was an underlining attraction between these two both in 2002 and in the present day. Claire is engaged and then married, and Ray respects those boundaries despite feeling that he is missing out on the love of his life, which he perceives isn’t even happy with the man she is with. Adding insult to insult is that she almost tells him straight up that he shouldn’t have respected these boundaries. It’s a lame storyline that doesn’t serve its purpose in this film.
And then there is Julia Roberts, who again confuses me as to whether she is one of the finest actresses of our time or the most overrated. In a movie that had maybe the most incredible ensemble in the last five years, Roberts was absolute dynamite in 2013’s August: Osage County, matching Meryl Streep scene for scene in a way that no one else would be able to do. In Secret In Their Eyes, her portrayal as Jess in the present day is terrible. Her portrayal of the 2002 Jess is awesome. She is fantastic as the carefree mom who likes her job, adores her co-workers, and lives for her daughter. And the scene of her crawling into the dumpster to cradle Carolyn’s dead body will send chills down your spine. So, of course, you would expect her to be a completely different person 13 years after losing the person in her life that met the most to her. But rather than being a grieving Jess and diving into that character, Roberts is simply playing a person who is void of emotion because she has lost her reason for being. There is a difference between being crushed by the circumstances life has dealt you and trying to play a character who is supposedly destroyed by the circumstances life has dealt you. I do not know Julia Roberts as a person and what sort of heartache she has experienced in her life outside of her acting career, but I felt that she couldn’t pull off 2015’s version of Jess…at all. If I had to pick one part of the movie that ruined it for me, I think it would be this. This is especially true this year where lead actress after lead actress (Brie Larson in Room, Cate Blanchett in Carol, Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn, Emily Blunt in Sicario, Sarah Silverman in I Smile Back) have just absolutely crushed it while playing characters who are grieving in some way. Aside from maybe Blanchett, none of these women has had the success of Roberts. I think that maybe Roberts was probably miscast for this role. But at the same time, I think that perhaps this movie had greater expectations than those it achieved due partly to Roberts’ sub-par performance.
Finally, I’m not yet sold on Billy Ray as a director. This is just his third directorial effort and only the second you’ve heard of (the excellent Breach being the other). I say this because this man has written some fantastic screenplays over the last decade, including Captain Phillips, The Hunger Games, Source Code, and State of Play, to start. I’m not going to give up on directing because the potential is there, but please don’t give up your day job because you are fantastic at it.
Underwhelming film. Check it out on cable if you are into suspense/mystery/drama type films.
Plot 7.5/10
Character Development 7.5/10
Character Chemistry 7/10
Acting 7/10
Screenplay 8/10
Directing 7/10
Cinematography 9/10
Sound 8/10
Hook and Reel 9/10
Universal Relevance 8/10
78%
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