An FBI agent and his informant

 

     Drugs. Impoverished living. A rundown town where the coal mine has gone dead. FBI corruption. Infidelity. And, of course, murder.

     These days chances are good that we're talking about a movie set in the American South.

    Above Suspicion, from director Phillip Noyce, tells the real-life story of how, in 1989, a rising FBI star formed a relationship with the seductive informant who helped him build an ascending career. 

     A spoiler? Not entirely. The movie's ending is revealed in the opening scene, a nod to William Holden's narration in Sunset Boulevard. The narrator of the story, it seems, already is dead.

    "You know what's the worst thing about being dead?''the late  Susan Smith asks. "You get too much time to think."

     Starting the movie at the end leaves us with one major question: How did Susan wind up dead?

     Emilia Clarke, familiar from Game of Thrones, portrays the movie's narrator, Susan, a woman living in Pikeville, Ky. Susan has the profile you’d expect in a movie such as this. She lives with but is estranged from her drug-dealing husband (Johnny Knoxville). She's also in the midst of a welfare scam.

    Desperate for a change, Susan reads a lot into the sudden arrival in town of FBI agent Mark Putnam (Jack Huston). Susan spots the agent getting out of a car looking sharp and healthy. She's overpowered by a desire to connect, seeing Putnam as a way out of town.

    From the start, Susan knows that Putnam is married. Putnam's wife (Sophie Lowe) supports her husband and, for much of the movie, has no idea that he might have a dark side.

   Stuck in a town that's portrayed as dirtbag hell,  the ambitious Putnam thinks he might impress his superiors by solving a string of bank robberies. En route, he leads a drug bust at Susan's home, opening the door for him to enlist her as a snitch. 

   Susan has more on her mind than helping Putnam advance his career. She tries to seduce him. After some half-hearted  resistance, Putnam takes the bait.

   Clarke mostly brings Susan to life, allowing her looks to be defaced to depict Susan's slide into terrible drug abuse.

   Huston, who played a man who had half his face blown off in HBO's Boardwalk Empire, can't quite locate a core for a character who perhaps doesn't have one. Putnam is self-absorbed and ultimately dangerous.

   Thora Birch doesn't get a chance to do much as Susan's sister, a hairdresser. Among the supporting cast, Knoxville lands the hardest hit.

    Noyce's varied resume includes movies such as Patriot Games, The Bone Collector, and Rabbit Proof Fence. He's a good director but he’s working with a story that follows a downbeat arc based on a real-crime book written by Joe Sharkey.

    Sharkey’s observant, detailed prose did more to create involvement than Susan's forlorn narration. 

    On screen, Above Suspicion has its moments, but it never feels as if we're discovering anything revelatory as we follow these characters on their predictably doomed journeys.

A familiar helping of sci-fi

Another adaptation of a popular young adult novel.

When a society seems perfect, it's probably time to start worrying.

That's part of the warning delivered by The Giver, an artful if slightly bland adaptation of a 1993 young adult novel by Lois Lowry.

Carefully assembled by director Phillip Noyce and boasting strong adult participation from Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Alexander Skarsgard, and Katie Holmes, The Giver serves as a well-made -- if too familiar -- cautionary tale about the perils of an over-controlled society that has tried to eliminate all knowledge of the past.

You needn't have read the book to know that someone -- in this case a young character named Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) -- eventually will challenge the prevailing order.

The story begins when young Jonas is selected as the Receiver of Memory, the one person who'll learn the real history of humanity prior to its imprisonment in this apparently idyllic world.

Jonas is introduced to memory -- and the pain it brings -- by The Giver (Bridges), a grizzled fellow who's allowed to know all of human history.

Because he possesses such knowledge, The Giver occasionally is called upon to advise the ruling elders about potential dangers that need immediate redress -- or something like that.

The Giver also has the power to transmit images from the past simply by grabbing Jason's arms and establishing a mind link, thereby saving his charge the trouble of having to read any of the many books in The Giver's vast library.

The movie opens at a ceremony in which Jason graduates into his adult role. His two best friends: Fiona (Odeya Rush) and Asher (Cameron Monaghan) are assigned their tasks, as well.

Jason's parents (Skarsgard and Holmes) watch the proceedings along with the rest of the parents, who aren't biological parents but adults selected for parenting roles.

Streep plays the Chief Elder, a woman with a school principal's smile and a hair style that looks as if it were borrowed from Cher. The chief elder keeps order by eliminating most of what we regard as human impulse.

Noyce shoots segments in the movie's sterile, smiley-faced utopia in black and white, introducing vivid color as Jason begins to see a more flavorful but dangerous world under The Giver's tutelage.

Of course, the colorless world in which all homes are the same and in which daily injections suppress both positive and negative emotions harbors hidden dangers. Babies judged "inferior" are killed, as are some of the elderly.

Looking like The Dude after a weird makeover, Bridges -- also one of the movie's producers -- adds gravitas, and Streep avoids Cruella de Vil cliches in a role that isn't likely to be pressed into her book of memories.

The young actors give serviceable enough performances. Skarsgard and Holmes are short-changed by the fact that they're playing characters with minimal personalities.

The movie unravels a bit during an ending that underscores the story's implausibilities, and the tale's main issues hardly qualify as startlingly original.

The Giver comes off as a well-intended helping of sci-fi built around a moral lesson: The problem with eliminating all of our worst tendencies is that it also does away with the best. That, of course, proves little aside from demonstrating that The Giver has a firm grasp of the obvious.

'Salt' is peppered with non-stop action

Angelina Jolie is armed and dangerous in Salt.

Angelina Jolie kicks much butt in Salt, a thriller about a CIA agent who's accused of being a Russian spy, and, as a result, spends most of the movie on the run. If you like improbable action -- no, make that impossible - action, you'll get your fill and then some from a movie that moves with Road Runner speed.

At one point, Jolie's Evelyn Salt leaps off an overpass onto a speeding semi-truck, and that's just the beginning of the sequence. The movie features feats no mortal could accomplish without either winding up in a coffin or a full body cast.

Salt? She takes a licking and -- as an old Timex slogan put it -- keeps right on ticking.

You can't believe a minute of this action, but the exaggeration can be fun, and - for the most part - director Phillip Noyce handles the mayhem with the kind of old-pro efficiency you'd expect from the man who directed Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, but who most recently has taken a sabbatical from Hollywood with small movies such as Catch a Fire, The Quiet American and Rabbit-Proof Fence. This time, Noyce abandons the logic that rules the physical world, and allows the action to rip as Salt tries to evade capture by two CIA colleagues (Liev Schreiber and (Chiwetel Ejiofor), fine actors who do what's required of them; i.e., they add seriousness and tension to a script that's not afraid to go over the top.

The screenplay puts Salt in jeopardy when a Russian defector (Daniel Olbrychski) turns up in Washington, and names her as a sleeper agent, timely stuff given recent news stories about Russian spies in our suburban midst. Salt denies any involvement with the Russians, and takes off in hopes that she can clear her name and save her scientist husband, who has been snatched by the very same Russians.

For a while, it looks as if Noyce has pulled off a nearly impossible feat, dropping mega-tons of fantasy action into a realistically presented environment. Cinematographer Robert Elswit has decided to keep the images on the dark side, and the movie has a brooding quality that suggests more importance than the story ever really earns.

I read somewhere that Salt resembles a Bond movie. Maybe a little, but the best Bond movies had winking humor, something that's lacking in Salt, a thriller with conspiratorial flavor that includes a new theory about the assassination of President Kennedy.

The dour mood probably is understandable. Much of the Bond humor involved 007's taste for high living, martinis and women. Evelyn Salt has no time for pleasure. She's interesting because she's not like Bond. She operates in a universe that's morally ambiguous. She's also motivated by personal concerns the likes of which seldom troubled Bond.

For most of the movie's fast-paced 100 minutes, Jolie looks deadly and dangerous, and some of the action is exceptionally well done. I had a white-knuckle moment when the script called for Salt to climb from window ledge to window ledge as she tries to flee her pursuers.

I happened to see Salt at a preview screening at which the film broke. During the time it took to get the screening up and running again, I asked my wife where she thought the plot was headed. She guessed right, which suggests that some of the key developments are not rife with surprise.

If you're a stickler for credibility, you'll want to steer clear of Salt, which is geared for a season in which we're asked to suspend disbelief as freely as we sometimes offer gratuitous advice. And given its pedal-to-the-metal approach, it's hardly surprising that Salt leaves the door open for a sequel. The way Jolie handles the action, it's likely we'll see one.