Suspect (1987)

The general thinking is that Cher can pretty much do anything.  She’s so confident and so talented that you assume on general principal that whatever she steps into she’ll succeed.  Much of my exposure to Cher has been through the movies, in films like Mask and Silkwood where she seemed organic to the blue-collar setting.  And that may be the problem.  Those films allowed her a setting with which to cushion her laid-back charm.  Her new film Suspect finds her in a stuffier profession, that of a hard-working public defender and somehow, she seems out of place.

I don’t know why.  Maybe because a courtroom is so formal.  Maybe it is the sight of her in those formal suits, uttering courtroom jargon with a formality that feels a little forced.  There is a wild abandon to Cher, she seems best as a free-range actor, not as someone locked into the formalities of a character role.

Even her name feels wrong.  I can’t attach her to Kathleen Riley, a name that I could easily see assigned to Jodie Foster or Jessica Lange.  And yet, I feel as if I’m being unfair.  Cher can play pretty much anything and I feel as though I am putting forth my outward opinion on her public persona and dismissing her from her role in Suspect without due process, if you will.

She fills the role very professionally, but not with any kind of extraordinary spice that I normally expect, though I get the temptation to take the role.  It is fun to build a workaholic character by means of her everyday habits – she rarely takes a day off; meals are peanut butter spooned out of the jar; evenings are spent in a dark office with a solidary desk lamp, pouring over paperwork, or digging through old files and law books looking or the latest angle.  Needless to say “Kathleen” needs a couple of days off, but just when that might seem a possibility, a new client drops into her busy life who has been accused of murder.

The particulars of the case seem to have more juice then a Florida orange.  Seems that the body of a DOJ secretary has just bubbled up in the Potomac with her throat slashed, and during a cursory search of the surrounding area, Washington police discover a shivering homeless man (Liam Neeson) huddled at the end of a drain pipe in a very near proximity to the secretary’s purse.

It seems open and shut.  “Kathleen” is assigned the case only to discover a wrinkle to her new client – he’s a deaf mute with whom she will have to develop a rapport in order to help him.  He’s also frightened, withdrawn and has a general distrust of just about everyone.  Given his circumstances, we kind of understand.  Never-the-less, she manages to get through his defensive exterior just well enough to become convinced that he wasn’t the killer.  She also discovers that his name is Carl, which also helps.

Well, if Carl didn’t do it, who did?  “Kathleen”’s dogged determination is helped along by one of the jurors on the case, a lobbyist named Eddie (Dennis Quaid) who breaks faith with his jury duty mandate and decides to do his own little investigation.  Naturally, Eddie and “Kathleen” fall for one another in a union that I found more interesting and authentic than anything else in the movie.

As a matter of fact, I wish that the movie had put the romance forward and the case in the background because the particulars of the case are built up nicely and then thrown away by the movie’s third act.  Cher’s long closing remarks throw a monkey wrench into the skillfully crafted whodunit logic of what had come before.  The revelation of what happened comes out of left-field and so the case we’ve been following is basically rendered meaningless.

That said, let’s come back to Cher.  I wish that she had played “Kathleen” in a different kind of movie.  During the scenes where she is working on the case, I didn’t believe it.  Yet, during the scenes where she interacts with Quaid, I found that certain laid-back charm that I always come to expect.  Suspect is a clockwork courtroom drama that badly needed fixing, meshed with a love story that I wanted to be explored further.