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Speranza
A Cold, Appraising Eye, Spying Treasure
‘The Best Offer,’ From Giuseppe Tornatore
It doesn’t take an expert’s eye to see that Virgil Oldman, the supercilious auctioneer played by Geoffrey Rush in Giuseppe Tornatore’s creaky art thriller “The Best Offer” (“La Migliore Offerta”), is riding for a fall.
And fall he does, for the unknown woman — to borrow the title of another Tornatore film — who wants to sell paintings and other treasures from the villa she inherited.
That the mysterious seller insists on communicating by phone or through closed doors probably increases her appeal to a man who makes much of his living looking at things.
Virgil and this woman, Claire, circle each other warily — she goes by Ms. Ibbetson at first — in a dance that’s partly about gaining the upper hand and partly about their respective weird habits.
Virgil is the kind of aesthete character whose cold formality goes hand in glove (he actually wears gloves) with a raging fear of intimacy.
Virgil is an art collector, aided by a swindle that he runs with a raggedy-haired painter buddy, Billy (Donald Sutherland, politely pitching in).
From this premise, one might wonder what delicious conspiratorial excesses might have transpired in other hands.
For instance, in the art-centered mystery “Trance,” last spring, Danny Boyle ambitiously disassembled his crazy story as fast as he told it.
Here the excesses come courtesy of Tornatore (“Cinema Paradiso”), the Italian filmmaker who sometimes seems to deliver his handsome, vintage 1990s art-house fare by the yard.
His latest, which takes place in a generic European city, looks set to introduce a collision of pathologies, or at least some overwrought dueling like his Depardieu-Polanski face-off, “A Pure Formality” (1995).
But “The Best Offer” settles in for a dull courtship leading to a bad end.
Adding a superfluous drone of intrigue, Virgil keeps finding old gears and doodads at the villa, and he takes them to a technical-whiz friend (Jim Sturgess) who also dishes out romantic advice.
Those metal bits gradually take shape as an antique automaton that provides, in its laborious construction and inevitable shape, an unfortunate metaphor for the film.
Rush, ever game to make a pitch, does bring nerve to his mercurial character, tempering a guy who’s often just a jerk, and his heavy features (which rival Kevin Spacey’s in shifting between masklike and animated) receive central attention from the cinematographer Fabio Zamarion’s camera.
But Rush can’t fly far on Tornatore’s dialogue and workmanlike plotting, and Sylvia Hoeks, as Claire, doesn’t bring a corresponding energy.
At one point, Virgil puts down Billy by airily declaring that his work lacks the inner mystery of true art.
The film includes its share of imagery from famous paintings whose names roll by in the credits, but the director stages his serviceable gothic mystery premise with the elegance of an auction.
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