Acting
is sort of an unspoken agreement between the thespian and the audience: He or
she pretends to be someone else, and we pretend we don’t know about the
pretending. Unfortunately, however, there are some actors whose stratospheric
celebrity is making it increasingly difficult for us to hold up our end of the
bargain. George Clooney immediately springs to mind, as does Brad Pitt.
Charlize Theron seems to have entered that realm now, too.
She and her shaved head did a decent job blending into the grime in “Max Max: Fury Road,” but in her new film, the disappointing
murder mystery “Dark Places,” the one-time Oscar winner’s adequate performance
as the troubled survivor of a grisly triple homicide can’t overshadow the fact
that she is Charlize Theron.
Based on the 2009 novel by “Gone
Girl” author Gillian Flynn, “Dark Places” stars Theron as Libby Day, a 30-something
Kansas City woman who was present at the slaughter of her family 28 years
earlier. Young Libby’s testimony resulted in her older brother Ben being
convicted for the killings, and nearly three decades later Libby is a surly,
hermetic hoarder long dependent upon the kindness of strangers, but that gravy
train is about to derail. Libby agrees to rent her insider access to a strange
group of true-crime enthusiasts, known as the Kill Club, who are convinced that
Ben Day is innocent. And though she remains staunchly convinced of her
brother’s guilt, Libby, with the help of the Kill Club’s Lyle (Theron’s “Fury
Road” co-star Nicholas Hoult), dives into the investigation.
The film essentially unspools in two
threads. One storyline flashes back to the events leading up to the murders of
Libby’s mother (the excellent Christina Hendricks, “Mad Men”) and sisters, an
overheated potboiler of money problems, child molestation, domestic abuse, satanism, and teen pregnancy; while the other follows Libby
and Lyle as they try to dredge up a past that wants to stay secret. It’s never
easy to shoehorn a novel into a two-hour movie, and here necessary details
don’t get the foundation they require, leading to several seemingly
out-of-nowhere developments and unsatisfying reveals. Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner adapted the source material himself, keeping
some of Libby’s deliciously noir narration but mostly eschewing her verbal
guidance in favor of simple, one-dimensional characters.
“Dark Places” is exceptionally
well-cast in the flashback sequences, with the gifted Tye
Sheridan (“Tree of Life”) as the young Ben, a good but impressionable kid being
led around by his hormones, and Chloรซ Grace Moretz (“Kick-Ass”) laying it on appropriately thick as the
manipulative teen temptress Diondra. The drab
modern-day action doesn’t fare as well despite the efforts of performers like
Corey Stoll (“Ant-Man”), Drea DeMatteo
(“The Sopranos”), and the unavoidably elegant Theron. Theron dutifully slouches
and scowls as the resentful Libby — described in the book as 4’11” and a D cup,
incidentally — but there aren’t enough dingy baseball caps in the world to dim
Theron’s inherent dazzle.
This article appears in Aug 5-11, 2015.
