The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)

John McTiernan's 1999 restaging of The Thomas Crown Affair arrives with a bowler hat, a Monet, and a policy of total aesthetic indifference toward the moral questions of its own decade. Pierce Brosnan plays a billionaire who robs a museum because his portfolio has failed to entertain him, and Rene Russo plays the insurance investigator who gives chase and then, in due course, gives in. The film is sleek to the point of weightlessness. It treats great wealth as a texture, a lighting choice, a reason for the apartment to have interesting art on the walls. There is no ledger of guilt here, no reckoning with what a hundred million dollars means or who it belongs to. The rich are simply decorative.

Russo's Catherine Banning is the most interesting piece of machinery on the lot. She is competent, sexually direct, and unbothered by the men who presume to supervise her. She matches Crown move for move, and matches him in the bedroom without apology. The film never stops to congratulate itself for this. It is genre convention, deployed with a straight face, and the result is a woman who feels adult instead of annotated. The supporting cast fills its chairs capably. Frankie Faison and James Saito appear in the margins, doing their jobs, attached to no thesis.

What remains is a caper about surfaces, and surfaces are all it wants. There is no sermon, no climate, no confession, no lesson in how we ought to live. Magritte's apple sits on a man's face because it looks good there. Nina Simone plays over the final theft because she sounds good there. We are asked to enjoy a competent man outwitting a competent woman until they decide they would rather not. It is not important cinema. It is, however, a very good time, and it makes no apology for that either.