mrwarmth

A wily, labyrinthine political satire that is saved from being over the top by the brilliant performances of its cast. The movie takes the paranoid storytelling style of the Cold War thriller, but applies it to American domestic politics instead. It is very much like "Three Days of the Condor" in that respect. However, "Winter Kills" has a much more sophisticated point of view on American politics than the latter film, and does a great job of showing how the interconnected corruptions of family, culture, technology and politics all intersect in the most surprising, and horrifying ways. The movie was way ahead of its time in this respect, and is just as relevant to day as it was when it was made - perhaps more so.

This is one of those movies where the quality of the acting is far above the material itself. Michael McKean and David Thornton are joys to watch. Also, though the plot is derivative, it is very knowing about business trips and sales people, and if you've ever been on a business trip, you'll find yourself laughing and nodding at many points. The movie never seemed false or strained, just a little weak at the very end. Up to that point, it's an above average investigation of salesmen gone bad. It's a bit like "Very Bad Things" only played more for comedy than for dark drama. Jake Weber, though British, does a very good job playing an American, something that cannot be said of many of his countrymen.

This is very focused film. It brings you into the lives of its characters, and the events that engulfed them, in a very direct way. The story of the Wonderland murders is told in Rashomon style, where you see the same event several times, from the points of view of different characters. This is handled very well, as the repetition is never boring.

Lots of great acting in this film. Lisa Kudrow heads the list, and steals every scene she is in. She plays Holmes' bitter, long suffering wife with understated brilliance. Though her scenes are brief, she communicates their whole history together without having to tell it.

At first I thought Kilmer was just reprising his patented doper-loser shtick (see The Salton Sea and The Doors), but as the movie progressed I saw he had thought a lot about Holmes' character, and his performance is actually very well suited to Holmes. He's very good at conveying Holme's infantile mommy complex, and his incomprehension that a woman wouldn't do instantly anything he wanted to done.

You probably wont' recognize Dermot Mulroney (from The Practice), playing thug Lind, but it's him. He's very scary and very good. A nice expansion of his repertoire.

The only problem with the movie is that it focuses with such intensity on the event of the murders themselves and the events leading up to it, that it provides no context for anything. There is no larger story at all. In this sense it is kind of claustrophobic. More importantly, the movie doesn't give you any reason to care about the events it describes, or the people they befell. At the end of the movie, it's hard not to say, "That was nice, but so what?" They should have spent a little more time building more of a scaffold around the events, so that they would have more intrinsic power and interest.

What the filmmakers did they did very well. They just left out one important thing, the absence of which keeps this film from being great.