Tell No One (2006)
French thriller recalls the days of Hitchcock

Take a large dollop of standard Hollywood fare — murder mystery, chase thriller and romantic tragedy — mix with a generous dash of Hitchcock’s favorite “wrong man” scenario and mellow it with a modest budget and a more “real-worldly” European sensibility and you have Tell No One, an entertaining, if occasionally overly convoluted, night at the movies.

Francois Cluzet stars as Alex Beck, a doctor who, eight years after wife Margot was murdered, receives a mysterious email with a link to video footage that apparently shows his wife still very much alive. Meanwhile, the recent discovery of two bodies on Beck’s isolated property has caused the police to reopen their investigation into Margot’s murder. As Beck investigates the email, the police investigate Beck, and before Beck can even say, “I’m not George Kaplan” he finds himself the focus of a citywide dragnet.

It’s all fairly well structured and competently made. Cluzet makes for a sympathetic character who only occasionally turns into a bit of a superman (a standard flaw of the genre, the mild-mannered guy who, when cornered, is suddenly on par with Navy SEALS). Here, the superhuman aspect comes in having Beck outrun a whole fleet of cops, but it does lead to a spectacular foot chase on the freeway that ends with some stunts that are totally insane.

If the film suffers from anything, it is a tendency to pile on a few more plot complications than are required. The film is derived from a novel by Harlan Coben, and its literary origins are apparent throughout. A novel just allows for so much more stretching room than the film format allows. Characters abound. They vie for space in a crowded landscape, each one at times behaving as if they are the central character (which, of course, from their viewpoint they are). Nipping like hounds at Beck’s spoor is an ambitious district attorney, a hotshot maverick cop, a competent but rush-to-judgement type cop, and a seasoned pro cop who alone suspects that Beck’s story is but a piece in a much larger puzzle.

Working against Beck are some truly repellent mercenary bad guys who do their best to make Beck look even more guilty, though I’m not really sure how that serves their agenda. It is perhaps to his credit that director Guillaume Canet draws so many varieties of traits from his actors. Each of them seems fully fleshed out, but for cops and mercenaries alike, most of their storylines ultimately lead nowhere. The film could be improved with some judicious streamlining of the secondary cast. For that matter, with a running time of nearly two hours, the film could stand to be trimmed by at least ten to fifteen minutes.

But some of the problems could be my fault as well. I don’t do very well with a lot of names floating about, and Tell No One sets names loose like a swarm of bees. Alex frequently goes in search of one character or another, and I couldn’t remember if we had actually met them before.

As with Howard Hawk’s noir classic, The Big Sleep where even the cast members and director often got lost in convolutions, there were moments in the film where I found it difficult to keep track of why and who was going what and where and their purpose for doing so.

But in spite of this, the film kept me interested to the end, and my quibbles may not apply to other viewers. The rest of the plot is so meticulously drawn (perhaps overdrawn). Final word is that in a genre prone to ever increasing levels of preposterousness, I appreciated that Tell No One does manage to stay relatively grounded,eschewing over the top action in favor of character development.