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| Damage |
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  (6/10)
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Runtime: 111 |
| Public Rating: 8.80 (15 votes) |
Director: Louis Malle |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Drama |
Year: 1992 |
| Writer(s): David Hare |
| Distributor: 1 |
| Reviewed by: Goatdog |
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In 1992's "Damage," Jeremy Irons plays a millionaire doctor-turned Member of Parliament who has his life completely under control. He's efficient, effective, and on the fast track to a high-power Ministry post. He is married to Miranda Richardson, with whom he is affectionate but not passionate: their relationship reminded me more of a parent-child relationship than anything else. The two of them have two children, one teenaged girl and an older son, played by Rupert Graves, who is an affable but aimless young man.
Irons learns that his son has met a new woman, and gets to meet her himself under strange circumstances. The woman, played by Juliette Binoche, approaches him at a party and the two exchange inflamed stares for a while. They are instantly in love, or at least Irons is instantly obsessed. It's never really explained what she sees in him, which is one of the problems I have with the movie; she simply wants to mess up his life, I guess. After a strained dinner where Graves introduces her to his family (Richardson immediately dislikes her), Irons goes over the edge. He confesses his lust for her, and the two start a rambunctious (there's no other word to describe their athletic, violent sex life) affair. She warns him "damaged people are dangerous, because they know how to survive," but he doesn't listen.
She's got a lot to hide, much of which doesn't really have anything to do with the film. It seems that she is lying to them about her past, but we never get any idea what the truth is. An appearance by her mother, played by the remarkable Leslie Caron (remember Gigi?), doesn't clear anything up, and I wonder how much was either left on the cutting room floor or in the pages of the original novel by Josephine Hart. The affair becomes more and more dangerous as Irons stops caring about his family knowing, and it leads up to a very... literary conclusion. It's the kind of ending that probably had readers saying "Wow," but it had me thinking, well, that it probably worked better on the page than onscreen.
I have never really been all that impressed with Juliette Binoche. She's too icy, too distant, too... angular. She bears a strange resemblance to Julia Roberts, not that it's necessarily a bad thing. Here, she's less a character than an idol for Jeremy Irons to debase himself in front of, and I suppose that is a sort of an excuse for her seeming somehow inhuman. But it's not just in this movie that I noticed that. Maybe she's an android. Probably not.
Jeremy Irons is an expert at obsession. Take this film, Dead Ringers, and Lolita, and you have an actor who either knows obsession or has been typecast. I still haven't seen Reversal of Fortune, for which he won his Oscar, but I think he is a remarkably brave and convincing actor within a very limited scope of roles. Can you imagine him as a truck driver? Nope. He does the upper-crust, stuffy British person really well, but I can't picture him as anything else.
Miranda Richardson was the best thing about this film. Other than her Oscar scene (the kind of histrionic fit that they love to show clips of at the Oscars), she's quietly convincing. The way she acts upon learning about the circumstances surrounding her son's death is remarkable. See the way she delivers her rhetorical question to Irons (I don't want to give too much away, but her delivery is perfect). She certainly deserved her Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress, and she shouldn't have lost to Marisa Tomei.
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