A young woman befriends a lonely widow who’s harboring a dark and deadly agenda towards her.
When you come from an island as small as Ireland, you tend to cheer for those who put us on the map, whether it be an actor, filmmaker, singer, writer, whatever their chosen profession if they hail from Ireland, you want to see them succeed. Director Neil Jordan comes from Sligo in Ireland and has made a vast array of wonderful films over the years including “The Company of Wolves,” “Mona Lisa,” “The Crying Game,” “Interview with the Vampire,” and “Michael Collins,” but he has also made movies that were not very well received, “High Spirits,” “We’re No Angels,” and “In Dreams” come to mind. My point is, as a filmmaker, you can never please everyone all the time so you take the hits with the misses and unfortunately, “Greta” falls into the latter category. Mr. Jordan has been out of the directing scene for the past five years and makes a return to the big screen with this less-than-stellar feature starring two very fine actresses, Isabelle Huppert and Chloë Grace Moretz.
While the premise for “Greta” is intriguing, the overall presentation is unremarkable and never once amounts to anything worthwhile. Mr. Jordan is more than capable of delivering a taut, nail-biting thriller, just watch his Oscar-winning “The Crying Game” for proof of that but here, everyone, and everything is relegated to textbook format, and as a result, the finished product falls flat on its face.
Frances (Chloë Grace Moretz) has just moved to New York City and is staying with her friend Erica (Maika Monroe). She works at a swanky restaurant and takes the train to and from work every day. Frances is very shy, withdrawn, and naive and prefers to keep to herself, declining Erica’s constant stream of party invites. With her mother having passed away the previous year, she is trying to find her way in life and avoids speaking to her father Chris (Colm Feore), who in her mind, serves only as a reminder of her painful past. While disembarking from the train one evening, she discovers a woman’s handbag sitting on a seat and rummages through it until she finds a driver’s license. Being the good person she is, she takes it to the address on the license and meets Greta (Isabelle Huppert), a lonely, eccentric French piano teacher. She invites her in and thanks her for returning her bag. Over tea, the two women talk and realize that they have a lot in common. With Greta’s daughter away in Paris who she hardly ever hears from and the loss of Frances’ mother, both women bond and Frances agrees to meet up with her as her schedule allows. One evening at Greta’s, while she is cooking dinner, Frances is looking for kitchen utensils and inadvertently glances through a cabinet which, much to her horror, is filled with handbags, exactly like the one she found on the train. Looking through them, she finds the exact same contents and drivers license that she discovered and freaks out. She pretends to be ill and makes her apology and leaves.
Once she gets home, she informs Erica, who is not surprised, telling her that the city is filled with all sorts of freaks. Erica tells her to forget about her and just move on with her life and while Frances agrees, Greta will not be ignored. Initially, Greta calls her on her phone but Frances just ignores her, hoping she will eventually give up and stop calling but then Greta starts turning up at her job, stalking her everywhere she goes. Frances is reduced to calling the police but because Greta has not physically done anything towards her, they cannot do anything about her standing outside her place of work and staring at her. What follows is a game of cat and mouse as both women navigate the streets of New York and with her patience running out, Frances finally confronts Greta face to face and tells her, once and for all, that she no longer wants to be friends but Greta has other plans.
The movie feels like it is trying to assimilate Adrian Lyne’s “Fatal Attraction,” with two women and a platonic relationship as opposed to a sexual one and even has aspects of Scorsese’s “Cape Fear” thrown in for good measure but in the end, it comes nowhere near those two classics. We are never told why Greta is as crazy as she is, in one scene, a character explains that she was released from the psych ward in Bellevue Hospital years earlier but that is all we are told. The film has the audacity to introduce a disturbed, unhinged woman but never explains why she is the way she is. We understand what makes Hannibal Lecter tick, as well as Norman Bates in “Psycho” and Dexter Morgan in “Dexter” because those writers cared enough to inform their audience and not take them for granted, here, we are just supposed to sit back and accept that Greta is batshit crazy and not ask why. Chloë Grace Moretz is a strong actress and I found it very aggravating that she portrayed her character with so much naivety and innocence that it bordered on unrealistic. Imagine taking Arnold Schwarzenegger and putting him in a movie where he plays a timid, feeble man who is constantly being bullied, you can only accept so much before screaming out “Bullshit”!
Isabelle Huppert plays her role with great delectation, relishing the opportunity to play an onscreen psycho but without proper character development and story exposition, her character eventually becomes tiresome and laborious, and you just want the film to be over. Neil Jordan is capable of so much better and while his regular onscreen persona, played by the always dependable Stephen Rea, turns up for a while, as he does in all his films, sadly, it is not enough to save the story. Mr. Jordan is very unpredictable and in this industry, that is vital if you want to succeed but after nearly 40 years as a successful filmmaker, I just wish “Greta” was one of his success stories.
In theaters Friday, March 1st
