Porter Wren is a New York-based black news reporter capable of identifying particular cases and sometimes succeeding in solving them. At a party organized by the new editor of his newspaper, he knows Caroline, the widow of a so famous and eclectic filmmaker that was found dead in the rubble of a demolition building. The woman asks her to investigate and Wren also accepts her passionately attracted her to the point of perhaps putting her family’s balance.
Adrien Brody has to be in love with (rightly) Colin Harrison’s novel because, in addition to being a protagonist and narrator, he is also a producer (among others) at Jennifer Beals who plays the role of his wife. You could, to simplify, place the whole operation in a further review of classical noir but it would end up being reductive. Because beyond the plot that keeps some strokes and the environment often, as a title, at night, the film finds its reason to be in the choice of the protagonists.
Because Brody has the body and the right look to give melancholy concreteness to a man who has neglected the other’s lives on his own professional cause. His articles are read and appreciated precisely because they know how to grasp the most revered aspect of human reaction to fear, pain, and death. In her eyes, how all this has become a constituent part of her way of rapporting with reality despite a wife and two children she loves. There is her fragility that Caroline (who uses her husband’s sadistic psychological extravagances) knows how to use it through a seductiveness played on all verbal means and on a body whose talents are more than conscious.
DeCubellis’s screenplay knows how to use these interpretive values ​​and builds a climate of expectation in which even the “bad” of the turn (the editor who feels that she has been blackmailed) ends up satisfying her with an unexpected revelation. The film then finds in Wren’s and his family a proposal for ‘architectural’ reading of the character of his protagonist. Just as the building wants to protect it from outside looks but it is in this that manifests its vulnerability. After watching a movie so well taken care of in detail, we wonder why we have not been able to find the way to the halls. She would have deserved much more than others.