SHADOWS & LIES

Shadows & Lies is your typical low-life gangster falls in love with the boss' number-one call girl story, but played out as an indie art film.

James Franco is a man without a past. More likely, he is a man who had his past erased by the fluke of a terrible tragedy, so now he drifts through the shadows of life. Living in an abandoned storefront, William (a new name he has adopted) apparently makes a living holding down a job as a nature video editor (which gives the filmmaker the excuse to show extended, slow-motion images of jellyfish, hummingbirds, and whatnot). Oh, that and the petty crime of pickpocketing that he does for kicks.

A mysterious gangster, simply known as the boss (Josh Lucas, with his baby blues shrouded by seemingly black contact lenses) take note of this quiet character's thieving skills and recruits him via some gentle verbal strong-arming from his top man Victor (Martin Donovan). To lure William, the boss offers him a woman, the beguiling call girl Ann (Julianne Nicholson). Ann senses in William a decent man, of course, as their encounter mostly involves polite niceties and mutual naps with no hanky-panky. William is apparently in love. The boss does not like this.

Shadows & Lies is a very slow, quiet, mood-driven film. By casting an actor like Martin Donovan, for instance, as a mob thug, you know the director is going for a depth of sensitivity that would be unusual for this genre. Franco and Nicholson are given long shots of just their facial expressions with no dialogue. Rather than spelling out characters' motivations with speeches, the filmmaker attempts to propel the story by sheer force of his actors' skills. To a certain point, this works, especially with this fine of a cast. However, it is the story itself that doesn't pull its equal weight.

"What's their motivation?" you may ask. The boss wonders this of William; William wonders this of Ann; the audience wonders this of all the characters. I had a hard time believing that an encounter or two with a lovely, sad woman would propel a man to split a john's head in half with a lamp. Hm. But maybe it would. In the meantime, the soundtrack drones on as slowly as the film, with humming extended notes of the melodica, occasionally interrupted by a few singular plings of a piano. Jellyfish float by. We are given another full screen shot of Franco looking suspicious... or maybe pensive... or maybe kind of blank, like the character himself. The droning melodica soundtrack buzzes on, and we, the audience, yawns.