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Review by Harvey Karten
3 stars out of 4
Remember that kid back in high school, the one who was
captain of the football team, so sexually assured that the
cheerleaders would flock around him, and what's more was able
to score in sciences and humanities in much the way he did with
the girls? What did you think of him? You admired him?
Hardly. You hated him, didn't you! You envied his natural good
looks and sought out the class dork so you could make fun of
him and feel superior to someone. Barbet Schroeder's
thoughtful and suspenseful "Murder by Numbers" is particularly
intriguing because the two high school seniors he focuses
on one a sexually assured charmer, the other a dorky
philosopher-- seem to get along just great, a complete reversal
of the stereotypical grouping of 17-year-olds by separate
categories like jocks, nerds, and as with the tragic event of
Columbine, Colorado High School, the outsiders who were
known there as the Mafia. The two young men are, in turn, the
"genius" who is sought after by at least one girl because of his
potential to help her in physics, Justin (Michael Pitt, "Bully"), and
the all-around, all-American Richard (Ryan Gosling) with whom
Justin has a subtly homoerotic bond.
As the camera shifts from the two boys to two detectives
determined to solve a murder case, Cassie (Sandra Bullock)
and her rookie partner Sam (Ben Chaplin), Schroeder peels
more than one onion during the two hours he enjoys with his
crew. We become even more interested in the psychological
problems of Cassie than in the minds of either of the two boys.
Schroeder, adapting Tony Gayton's screenplay with a
Hitchcockian style (we know the identity of the killers in the very
beginning of the movie), keeps us wondering what there is in
Cassie's background that makes her hate this kid Richard so
much, makes her so fiercely determined to pin a murder rap on
him that she risks her mental health and pushes the envelope
with her boss in the local California homicide division. Cassie is
as sexually aggressive as the kid she's after, seducing Sam, her
new partner, and then kicking him out of her houseboat
residence when he's more than eager to have breakfast with
her. We wonder why, when Cassie investigates a scene of a
brutal crime, she reverts in her memory to a traumatic situation
in her own life that must be the source of her pain.
As Cassie questions young Richard who deliberately does not
seek a lawyer because he and his intellectual pal Justin want to
prove that they are smarter than the cops a counter-
transference takes place. Richard is being psychologically
broken down by the detective but more interestingly Cassie is
herself undergoing stress because of an incident in her life that
comes to her conscious mind painfully during the interrogations.
Ben Chaplin does well as yin to Sandra Bullock's yang, a
passive guy (as he was in "The Birthday Girl") while Bullock,
who is co-executive producer of the film, chucks her comic
demeanor to become a troubled, no-nonsense, sexually
conflicted powerhouse.
The melodramatic ending, which some in the audience will
probably cheer as a break from the tense scenes of non-
violent psychological tension were for me the only
disappointment in a classy thriller that does justice to the
Iranian-born Schroeder, the son of a German geologist raised in
Iran and Argentina before settling down in France. There's no
surprise that he once wrote for the classy Cahiers du Cinema,
given his painstaking laying of the groundwork in this murder
story, and garnered an Oscar nomination for one his most
chilling works, "Reversal of Fortune."
Copyright © 2002 Harvey Karten
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out of 4
