The Burnt Orange Heresy (2020)

Film: The Burnt Orange Heresy (2020)
Stars: Claes Bang, Elizabeth Debicki, Mick Jagger, Donald Sutherland
Director: Giuseppe Capotondi
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Genre is a strange thing.  With film we see it in most movies.  Westerns, musicals, comedies...with these subjects we have some sort of expectation of where the movie might lead us.  I don't entirely remember when The Burnt Orange Heresy came onto my purview; I believe it was one of the movies that was playing in the Landmark Theaters that I love so much right before the movie theaters closed but after I was too scared to go to a theater (Emma, which we profiled recently, would also meet this classification), and its cast intrigued me.  However, I was under the impression for some reason that the movie was a straight-forward drama, perhaps a coming of age film about a jaded young man who is taught a life lesson in the arms of a beautiful woman & by a wise old man.  While watching the trailer gives a bit more clues as to what the film plays into, it definitely has enough trappings of one genre (drama) to trick you into ignoring that it's really another (thriller).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers around James (Bang), an art critic with clear talent, but who spends most of his days giving lectures to tourists about the importance of art criticism.  He meets in one of these lectures Berenice (Debicki), a beautiful but enigmatic woman with whom he starts an affair (one of those "we won't speak about our pasts" style ones that only exist in the movies).  They are invited to the splashy home of Joseph Cassidy (Jagger), a ludicrously wealthy art dealer who has a proposition for James.  He knows that James, already a pariah in some circles of the art world due to embezzlement, has certified & forged a Modigliani painting that Cassidy recently sold to the Tate.  If James can't procure a painting from the reclusive but storied Jerome Debney (Sutherland), who lives at the edge of Cassidy's property, Cassidy will out him to the world, ensuring he will never reclaim his status in the art world, and likely end up in jail.

This does sound like the set-up to a good thriller, potentially a caper if necessary, or a feel-good film where Debney eventually takes a shine to James & James gains redemption.  But these things don't happen, and the movie takes a dark turn.  Debney, it turns out, seems to have been an accidental genius, with his "empty frame" being something that everyone over-read into, similar to what James warns tourists about in the film's opening scenes.  He's been tricking Cassidy into letting him live on his property, but he has created nothing, the muse still there but not the urge to paint, so he just mentally sketches a canvass.  Berenice appreciates this, charmed by the old man, but James realizes without a painting he will be outed, and so he burns down Debney's studio, stealing one blank canvass that Debney has called "The Burnt Orange Heresy," and forges the painting, pretending it's an original Debney.  When Berenice discovers this, he murders her, first by drowning (and when she miraculously lives through that, by blunt object).  Drowned, his evidence is gone, and Debney soon dies (with us assuming Cassidy might have helped), and we get a true juxtaposition in the film's final moments, with Cassidy now owning the "only Debney" in the world, even though it's a forgery, while Berenice's mother, getting a painting as a present from Debney (that Cassidy assumes isn't signed, but in fact is), holds the only real painting, hanging with magnets on her fridge, a portrait of her daughter from memory.

This all sounds cool, and it kind of is.  The twists are welcome, upsetting the format, and giving us a genuinely scary thriller.  It just...doesn't gel.  None of the characters save for Jagger's Cassidy (Jagger is not a good actor, and it comes across in his stilted line readings, but he does embody a megalomaniac well) makes sense, and the remaining actors aren't able to make sense of the script.  Bang's James is too mysterious, not giving us enough hints of the cruelty underneath, while Debicki's Berenice doesn't give enough hints of the innocent.  I get the difference between the two-James is a forgery, someone who is more vested in the story than in authenticity, while Berenice, who doesn't lie about who she is (and thus Debney rewards her with a real painting), is an honest representation, but the script doesn't give us enough hints of these actors, and neither are able to land underwritten characters.  Sutherland's Debney feels rife with cliches about an aging artist, obsessed with the world & not the art that made him famous, but like the film itself, engages with intellectual exercises that don't work.  The movie is arguably at its best for shock value, and I can't say I didn't enjoy the twists, but when you examine the finished project it feels incomplete.