Muddled ‘Greta’ still proves Isabelle Huppert is a singular white female

So fervent are her fans that Isabelle Huppert may think she can do anything. We can do with testing. Two years after scoring a well-earned Oscar nomination for Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, the French actress stars in Greta, about a lonely widow whose malevolence is a secret to whomever she meets. While I’m delighted she chose a murder thriller in which to test the constrictions of genre, writer-director Neil Jordan indifferent pacing and expected twists squeeze the tension out of the movie and, worse, the zest from Huppert’s performance. The film and its director aren’t up to her commitment.

At least the premise is promising. When Frances (Chloë Grace Moretz) spots an abandoned green handbag on the NYC subway, she traces it back to Greta, a widow who looks like and has the speech patterns of Isabelle Huppert. In stiff, correct English she persuades Frances to stay for tea. The apartment looks like it hasn’t been aired since the Battle of the Bulge, in sharp contrast with the Tribeca loft shared by Frances and her friend Erica (Maika Monroe). Behind a piano a loud thumping bothers Frances, though, but not enough to share her phone number and begin a relationship: dinner, coffee, that sort of thing. “My friends say I’m like chewing gum — I tend to stick around,” Frances tells Greta. I doubt young adults have watched many films released before 2000, but if Frances had seen Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher  (2002) she would’ve known that a woman who looks like Huppert is one from whom she should sprint. Soon enough an accidental discovery while at Greta’s alarms Frances. She cuts Greta from her life. Undaunted, Greta leaves countless messages, shows up at Greta’s restaurant job, demands to know what she has done wrong.

Speaking of film history, Greta belongs in the lineage of women-in-peril movies, for reasons of social history hits in the Poppy Bush Interzone (think Single White Female and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle). It’s not that Huppert is above the material: this actress has starred in many a Claude Chabrol film, not to mention lots of French trash that has never gotten domestic release. Greta‘s problem is that it’s as thin as wax paper and Huppert can do nothing except administer defibrillated shocks to the corpse-like script.

Among directors for hire, Neil Jordan is among the least qualified to do likewise. In 1999, fresh from the triumph of The Butcher Boy, a return to the miniaturist filmmaking in which he specialized before the success of The Crying Game, he accepted In Dreams, a woman-in-jeopardy picture starring Annette Bening and Robert Downey, Jr. — often laughable, mostly sodden, but worth a look. Called upon to keep up with the hoofing of a will-she-or-won’t-she movie, Jordan muffles the suspense. It’s not even clear if he knows this isn’t a mood picture like 2003’s wonderful Nick Nolte-starring The Good Thief or a mood/character picture like 1986’s Mona Lisa. To keep audiences awake, he resorts to gruesome closeups of syringes inserted into maimed bloody flesh. Dario Argento he’s not. As for Moretz, she’s fine without milking sympathy. Monroe steals her scenes with her patrician insouciance; often I wished she were Huppert’s antagonist. Jordan vet Stephen Rea makes a decent cameo as a P.I.

Blessed with the most compelling stone face since Buster Keaton, Huppert gives Greta her all. During a moment of triumph, Greta does a leadfooted dance in her living room. It’s fresh and funny and a sop to the audience — a Huppertian moment at last.

GRADE: C+