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‘Business of Strangers’ examines one day
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Three characters: A newly-promoted CEO (Stockard Channing), a twenty-something, feisty intern (Julia Stiles), and a businessman (Fred Weller) who’s also a rapist. Or is he?
Perhaps the most endearing thing about “The Business of Strangers” is its attempt to tell such a small story. The events cover one day, and the locations are an airport and a hotel. Of course, it’s one of a thousand movies to use a small cast and severely limited locations, but this movie goes a step farther in its diminutive story. The characters either don’t know each other or barely know each other before the beginning of the movie, hence the title, and the happenings are unconventionally minor for a movie. So it is ambitious in that respect.
But if you’re asking, “So what?” Then you are asking the right question. If the film offers an answer at all, it would be “So nothing.”
We begin the movie essentially where we end the movie. The one thing that changes is (possibly) the CEO’s concept of reality. Which is no big deal because she’s not terribly bright.
Correction: She’s intelligent for the first act of the movie, but she gets stupider and stupider (with a little help from an excuse called booze-though she only seems drunk in one scene). The movie asks us to believe that this woman, who has worked her way through the corporate ladder with dedication and fervor, is more naive than the audience is. The plot-twist that stinks up the theater thirty minutes in takes her the entire film to catch a hint of. The twist is so obvious; in fact, that I would have been more surprised if it worked in the usual way.
The first twenty minutes of the movie are spent world-making. That is, creating the sterile business milieu that is the backdrop. It’s great. Those 20 minutes had me on board and ready for the pick-up. But the pick-up never picked up. There is an emphasis and minute focus on the emotions of Channing’s character that had me interested in her as a representative of the corporate community at large. She is a woman who has become so emotionally dependent on her career that she has no perspective outside of herself. In wake of 9-11 and other recent tragedies, seeing her on the verge of tears after a career setback put me in the right framework of understanding: these people who conduct the business of strangers do not live in my world. They live in a magical land called Corporate America, and the rules and concerns are different there. I was interested in this and had given myself to the movie. But it couldn’t convince me that its implausible happenings could be real, or that its moral questions about men and women’s cruelty and power over each other were honest ones.
Playing at The Flicks.
Mark Hitz
