The Best Offer - a complex and convoluted film which needs some set-up remarks before my own take. The lugubrious Geoffrey Rush stars as Virgil Oldman, a much lauded and exceedingly respected fine art auctioneer with a finicky approach to dress and behaviour bordering on the autistic, who specialises in assessing and selling off the artistic assets of deceased estates. He rarely interacts with his customers, preferring a small army of assistants to handle the day to day demands of the business, and repairs nightly to his extraordinary personal gallery of priceless female portraits, acquired over a lifetime and displayed in a concealed, vaulted chamber within the confines of his beautiful, yet sterile apartment. These have been acquired through a long-standing partnership with a failed painter, Billy Whistler (Donald Sutherland), whereby the pair locate, deliberately undervalue and procure the collection. Slowly and gingerly he is drawn to take on an estate which is survived by a solitary, reclusive female, Clare Ibbotsen (Sylvia Hoeks) who is even more hermit-like than himself, so agoraphobic and timid that she will not even meet him in the flesh and will only engage in conversation while concealed behind a set of trompe-oeil doors in the private rooms of her parents crumbling mansion. While cataloguing the many works in the house, Virgil stumbles across machine parts which he takes to young friend, Robert (Jim Sturgess), a mechanical genius, capable of repairing and restoring virtually any machine. Between the pair of them, they realise they have the makings of an 18th century automaton, which is painstakingly constructed cog by flywheel over the balance of the film. This is a many-layered film which has garnered mixed reactions from various critics, some loving the depth of filmcraft required to create its saturated look and feel, others finding it hamfisted and bludgeoning in its artless explanation of what is happening on screen. I have always liked Geoffrey Rush since I first saw him in Shine and here he gives a detailed, finely drawn performance of a man falling for a real woman for the first time in his life, observing the decay and destruction of a carefully constructed, daintily delivered persona into a helpless, broken pile of crushed emotions. It is compelling to watch and this alone makes the film worthy of an outing. You get the sense early on that Virgil is riding for a fall and there is a degree of train-smash magnetism that glues you to the screen and, to that extent, allows you to overlook the sometimes heavy elbow in the ribs or the finger waggingly pointed at what is going on, when you can pretty much see for yourself. Arguably, it is a somewhat self-regarding and arthouse-wannabe, but if you can manage to overcome the furious nudging, it is a fine spectacle occupying similar visual territory to its more lauded cousin, La Grande Belleza. A 7 by its fingernails, mostly for the visuals, the painstaking care of appearance and Mr Rushs craft.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 13:05:17 +0000
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