By adapting Patricia Highsmith’s 1954 novel The Blunderer into the indie feature A Kind of Murder, screenwriter Susan Boyd has attempted a sort of feminist crime thriller, one whose psychological characterizations and thematic concerns are as sympathetic to women as they are to the pulpy pleasures of genre fiction. It’s an ambitious undertaking previously mounted by Todd Haynes, who turned the Highsmith novel The Price of Salt into the 2015 knockout, Carol. But Boyd’s goals seem pressed against director Andy Goddard’s desires to take a more conventional approach, pointing the material toward a decidedly nostalgia-oriented space by replacing the book’s original 1950s setting with the early ‘60s. As such, the story’s twists and turns are dulled by bored plotting and bland period details, though Boyd does manage to tweak noir tradition enough to keep things mildly interesting. To paraphrase New York Times critic Anthony Boucher’s review of the original source material, A Kind of Murder is not a successful film, but an inspired attempt nonetheless.
The narrative resembles Highsmith’s own breakout Strangers on a Train, which was famously adapted by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. Two men with murder on their minds—bookstore owner Kimmel (Eddie Marsan) and aspiring crime novelist Walter Stackhouse (Patrick Wilson)—cross paths with detective Lawrence Corby (Vincent Kartheiser) after Kimmel’s wife is found murdered outside a roadside diner. Looking for creative inspiration and believing Kimmel is behind the killing, Stackhouse opens an amateur investigation only to wind up the primary suspect in a second, similar murder. Goddard takes a routine approach to this central mystery, utilizing familiar storytelling strategies and demonstrating little in the way of creativity or ingenuity. Kartheiser, utterly unconvincing in his role, certainly doesn’t help matters; his casting feels very much like a lazy attempt to conjure some “old school vibes” leftover from his role in Mad Men, and nobody is mistaking Pete Campbell for a steely detective.
Yet the film manages to come to life when exploring the intersections of guilt and lust, a meeting point where Boyd finds her most decisive concerns. Rather than adhere to noir standards, she replaces thwarted sexual desire with toxic masculinity as the link to murder, and she takes a decidedly feminist lens to the genre’s standard Judeo-Christian treatment of adultery and other sinful behaviors. If placing the story in the early ‘60s serves anything other than our ongoing obsession with nostalgia, it may be to better emphasize the look of male sexual license on the eve of the free love movement. These ideas are illustrated in Walter’s relationship with Ellie (Haley Bennett), the irresistibly sexy jazz singer who distracts him from his neurotic and depressed wife, Clara (Jessica Biel). Boyd depicts Walter as the prime motivator behind their illicit affair, of which Ellie acts as a willing participant but never a scapegoat or incendiary force. As Walter begins to indulge in various fantasies—cheating on his wife, leaving his wife, murdering his wife—the paranoia and hatred that gradually overtakes Clara has the distinct markings of a callous male figure pursuing his own selfish ends at the expense of a woman’s perception of both herself and, crucially, other women. The mantra he adopts— “I didn’t do anything wrong!”—is not only the film’s unofficial slogan and underlying theme, but also the central idea behind Boyd’s subversive dark humor.
Though relegated to a subplot, this scenario proves infinitely more interesting than the primary storyline that maintains focus on the interplay between Walter, Kimmel and Corby, which only grows more tedious as the film unfolds. There’s nothing engaging about the particulars of Goddard’s conclusion, even if it honors Highsmith’s original vision of guilty consciences converging in a compact, shadowy space. Ultimately, what’s in the denouement is underlined by what’s missing: the dramatic urgency generated by Ellie, Clara and society’s evolving morality and view of women in the wake of Eisenhower’s America. If a central story focused on the plight and emotional duress of three men proves fruitless and uninteresting, perhaps it’s because of the abandoned and otherwise downplayed female perspective. By removing A Kind of Murder’s most engaging and vital element, the filmmakers call attention to exactly what makes it—and cinema in general—so crucial to begin with.
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