Flawless (2007)

The heist picture has long been a reliable vessel for grievance, and Flawless loads its cargo with some care. Michael Radford sets the proceedings in a 1960 London of oak desks and vault doors, where the London Diamond Corporation conducts its business with the solemnity of a cathedral. Michael Caine plays the night janitor with the weary precision of a man who has done this many times before. Demi Moore plays Laura Quinn, the sole female manager in the building, with a tight-lipped competence that the script treats as an asset and the company treats as an inconvenience. It is a tidy, modest thriller. Nothing in it aspires to more than that.

The film's grievances are structural, not rhetorical. Quinn has been passed over for promotion six times, and the screenplay lets that fact sit in the room without a speech attached to it. Her resentment is the mechanism that makes the plot turn. The true villain, when he is finally named, is an insurance syndicate executive whose leisurely handling of a medical claim killed a woman, which positions institutional indifference as the genuine antagonist. Corporate cruelty here is not a talking point. It is a motive, and a serviceable one.

What the film declines to do is instructive in its own right. The 1960 corporate world it depicts is uniformly white, and the film has no interest in commenting on that. There is no sexual diversity, no disability, no environmental conscience, no attempt to reinterpret the historical record. The moral content arrives through the machinery of the plot instead of a lecture, and the effect is a picture that carries progressive sympathies the way a man carries an umbrella on a cloudy day: present, but not announced. For anyone cataloguing the cultural commitments of 2007 cinema, Flawless registers as a small, sincere artifact. It has opinions. It mostly keeps them to itself.