This HBO flick, directed by Bob Balaban, has some just astonishing, low-key acting — Ralph Fiennes seems to disappear into so many different kinds of roles, despite his rather singular looks. Here he’s a slightly-campy butler hired on by the lonely harridan tycoon Doris Dukes (an equally great Susan Sarandon). The movie is perversely unstructured, in ways that I like; it resists the beats and tempo of the three-acts we’re so used to in movies, it jumps from time to time, there are rarely big moments of crisis or conflict or catharsis. Instead, it burrows under the skin of each character through the prism of their strange, hard-to-categorize relationship.
This isn’t going to keep you on the edge of your seat, but the acting alone kept me engrossed. There’s a scene about mid-film in a hothouse, as the two late at night repot some orchids, where not much is really said and nothing truly plot-shifting happens, that is about the finest acting I’ve seen in some time. After seeing Fiennes tear off a hock of ham with glorious pleasure in Bruges, it was amazing to see him take the same techniques (a shifting of his physical carriage, precise and intimate movements of hands and eyes, a use of his voice that in pitch and rhythm gives us more information about the character) for a wholly different kind of act.