CONVOLUTED: JENNIFER 8, WHISPERS IN THE DARK, WHITE SANDS
There's a famous story about the making of Howard Hawks' THE BIG SLEEP (1946), based on the famous novel by Raymond Chandler. Supposedly, Hawks wired Chandler to find out how one of the characters in the novel died; was he murdered or did he kill himself? Chandler wired back that he didn't know, and the issue was left unresolved. Despite the fact that the resulting movie doesn't always make sense, THE BIG SLEEP still stands as one of the all time great movies. Unfortunately, few movies are THE BIG SLEEP, and that's a shame, because thrillers and crime stories have been copying that film's propensity for convoluted plots, without being as good. Bruce Robinson's JENNIFER 8, Christopher Crowe's WHISPERS IN THE DARK, and Roger Donaldson's WHITE SANDS all have the following in common: all three feature one standout supporting performance (in each case, the actor is playing a cop of some kind), and all three get the atmosphere necessary for a thriller down pat, but all three also have unnecessarily complicated plots that should needed a rewrite.
Robinson's film in particular seems like he asked the question, "What if John le Carre wrote a serial killer movie?" Le Carre also writes novels with complicated plots, but they end up being skillfully done, and long on not only atmosphere but theme and character development, so we can follow them even when they become difficult. And just as in a typical le Carre novel, there's even a lengthy interrogation scene. But Robinson is no le Carre.
Andy Garcia stars as John Berlin, who's moved from being a cop in LA to a cop in a small town in Northern California. His best friend and former partner Freddy Ross (Lance Henrikson) is a detective, and discovers John as he's digging around a city dump, which is a crime scene. At the scene, Berlin discovers a severed hand. Because the hand is worn from Braille marks, Berlin concludes the woman was blind. Soon, he finds there's been a number of blind women who were killed in the town, all unidentified and given the tag "Jennifer." Berlin goes to a school for the blind and finds Helena Robertson (Uma Thurman), a blind music teacher who may have heard the killer, and is possibly the next target. Naturally, no one believes him; not Freddy, not their boss Citrine (Kevin Conway), and especially not John Taylor (Graham Beckel), who was working the original case. Also, naturally, Berlin starts to fall in love with Helena.
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