By JOE SHARKEY
Sharkey, who was a New York Times weekly columnist for 19 years and an editor at the Wall Street Journal before that, is the author of five books, including “Above Suspicion.”
The release itinerary of “Above Suspicion” was so thoroughly bungled that in recent years I had been sarcastically referring to the long-delayed movie with an alternate title: “Beyond Belief.” The movie, starring Emilia Clarke, finished production at the start of 2017 after a three-month shoot in eastern Kentucky. Then producers promptly squabbled with each other and the pooch got screwed, to quote that cynical test pilot in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.
On the shelf it sat.
After a long delay involving clumsy, unyielding talks with U.S. distributors, the movie opened in 2019, inexplicably without fanfare, in theaters in the Middle East, and then drifted for a long time like a ghost ship through the world’s video-streaming seas. To name a few of its ports of call on that maiden voyage: Lebanon, Israel, Greece, Germany, Italy, Japan, Australia, Mexico. Bulgaria! (But not the U.S.).
I had a vested interest, as “Above Suspicion” was adapted from my non-fiction book of the same title, a true story about a dashing rookie FBI agent who has an affair with a pretty coal miner’s daughter who was his criminal informant in the brooding hollows of eastern Kentucky. When he ultimately rebuffs her, she threatens to tell his bosses and his wife. He kills her, stuffs her naked body the trunk of his government car, drives to a full day of meetings hours away, ditches the body that night in a mountain ravine – and (being deemed above suspicion) gets away with the crime for almost a year before he confesses -- and goes to prison.
In the movie, Emilia Clarke plays the dead girl. Jack Huston is the FBI agent. Phillip Noyce is the director. Chris Gerolmo (who wrote “Mississippi Burning”) did the screenplay.
After its odd foreign tour, “Above Suspicion” went back into hibernation, but then suddenly became available in summer 2020 on streaming and in DVD in Britain -- to the surprise of both the director and the star, who hadn’t been informed in advance that their movie was opening. A big fan of the movie, Jeffrey Wells, wrote in his influential Hollywood Elsewhere blog, “Emilia Clarke, who is rightly proud of her performance as the murdered FBI informant Susan Smith, and would have granted interviews to generate interest, was never even told about the British streaming release” until a few days beforehand.
The movie generated lukewarm-at-best reviews in a few online movie sites in the UK. Some of those reviews were written by critics who obviously had no understanding of the tangled, dystopic coal-mountain social and cultural environment where the movie, like the book, was set.
At the same time, a true stinker of a movie, Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy, based on a stinker of a book by J.D. Vance, was bouncing around the cinemas and streaming sites, generating very unfavorable reviews for its depictions of low-life stereotypical hillbilly characters. Like the book, that movie reinforced the cultural-elite prejudice that disenfranchised, poor hardscrapple whites of Appalachia -- the “hillbilly problem” -- are essentially responsible for their own plight and need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, just like ol’ J.D. Vance managed to do after he got hisself into Yale Law School. Wildly popular, the book and the subsequent movie soured the market on the general idea of critically acknowledging any new honest drama based on the desperation and human tragedy that can be found in parts of Appalachia.
The pandemic, meanwhile, had shut movie theaters for well over a year. Finally, Above Suspicion opened in the U.S. after Lionsgate began properly distributing it in May 2021. Given the negative atmosphere already in place about the “hillbilly problem,” only a few major publications saw fit to do reviews. Two heavy hitters, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, didn’t assign their top critics but instead published indifferent but generally negative reviews written by John DeFore, a freelance critic for The Hollywood Reporter, and Guy Lodge, the UK freelance reviewer for Variety.
These red flags waving in Britain -- not to mention the tantalizing lure of literally trashing the lovely Emilia Clarke -- signaled small-time U.S. reviewers to rush in and dump on the movie in reviews aggregated on online sites like the all-powerful Rotten Tomatoes. On Rotten Tomatoes, a gem in the growing genre of snotty journalism came from an 18,000-circulation Gate House Media/Gannett newspaper near Boston called MetroWest Daily News, where a freelance critic named Ed Symkus dismissed “Above Suspicion” as “an unpleasant, tawdry film that features a parade of odious characters” in which “pretty much everyone has streaks of immorality or stupidity” -- in a town that Symkus refers to – twice – not as the actual town of Pikeville, Kentucky, where the book and movie were mostly set -- but as “Pineville.” Symkus hated Emilia Clarke’s tragic Susan Smith (a role Emilia labored on mightily to summon young Susan Smith to life as a complex human being) as merely a “hot-tempered, drug addled, sex-starved piece of white trash.”
I was a consultant on the movie shoot. On location in eastern Kentucky, Emilia told me that she’d read my book several times. She also plowed through dozens of pages of transcripts of my interviews with with the killer, his wife, and others who knew Susan Smith, as well as my research notes, in her determination to understand the complex, sad girl she was playing. Emilia stayed in character on location. The accent she affected, which some clueless critics claimed did not sound sufficiently “southern,” was in fact a faithful representation of the way they actually speak in the coal mine regions of southern Appalachia, rather than in, say, coastal South Carolina.
Jack Huston also dug into his part as the FBI rookie with brio. Jim Huggins, a smart retired FBI supervisor from Kentucky who had led a team that finally broke the actual case in 1990, worked closely on location with the eager Huston on realistically interpreting the role.
In their reviewing gigs, some freelancers scowled about the movie’s depiction of a dystopic mountain society, suggesting that “Above Suspicion” was condescending and unwoke in its attitudes, just like that dreadful “Hillbilly Elegy.”
RogerEbert.com’s Brian Tallerico, reflected that, saying of “Above Suspicion” that “the whole project has a sense of ‘hillbilly dress-up’ not unlike a certain divisive Ron Howard film of last year. Bluntly, and like that film, I never bought that any of these people were real.” Tallerico continued, “The characters of "Above Suspicion" are not quite hillbilly caricatures but they verge so closely to them that you can see overqualified actors like Clarke struggling against the superficial script and filmmaking choices.”
Rotten Tomatoes is obviously a useful resource given its aggregation of reviews of all sorts, by working critics as well as by the general-public audience. But the formula loses value when reviews congregate herd-like into simple “up or down” overall scores based on reviews by movie critics who presumably know something about cinema, as well as on the vox populi feelings of average moviegoers, some of whom are cogent, but some of whom simply don’t like a movie. On Rotten Tomatoes, reviews of “Above Suspicion” were soon assembled into dismal ratings – currently a mere 25 percent positive for critics and 33 percent positive for general audience. That 25 percent rating from actual critics includes a scant total of 40 reviews, only seven of them classified by Rotten Tomatoes as “top critics,” none of them except the UK’s Guardian newspaper being from major publications such as The New York Times or Los Angeles Times, both of which ignored the movie. Most of the Totten Tomatoes “top critics” are bloggers, actually.
Among the overwhelmingly negative general audience scores is the following pungent review, in its entirety, from someone signed “Mark D,” who opined: “Bad, bad, bad! Very bad!”
I don’t know why the scrappy Boston Herald tabloid, an actual big-city newspaper, doesn’t make the Rotten Tomatoes cut as employing a “top critic,” by the way. Its reviewer, James Verniere, noted wryly that “Above Suspicion” is a story of “a man and a woman who might have led happy lives, if only they had not met.”
Actually, there was no way the smart but deluded Susan Smith was ever going to have a happy life, but that’s my opinion. Verniere’s was that “Above Suspicion” might be described as a little bit “Postman Always Rings Twice” and a little bit “Kiss Me Deadly” … “Above Suspicion,” which was completed in 2019, might have been a new film noir classic. … Clarke turns [Susan Smith] into a memorable and, in spite of her sins, even likable ‘femme fatale.’ Clarke’s Appalachian junkie enchantress steals more than just scenes. She steals the movie.”
Deadline’s Pete Hammond, a “top critic,” also got it right about Emilia Clarke’s breakthrough dramatic performance. “‘Above Suspicion’ benefits from a strong dose of authenticity anchored by a revelatory performance from Clarke, who nails the demeanor and accent of a doomed soul trying to escape a beaten life. The star’s ‘Game of Thrones’ fans might find her virtually unrecognizable here, but it is a thoroughly accomplished performance.”
One Hollywood writer, overlooked by Rotten Tomatoes, has been definitive about this movie since it started being shown to insiders in private previews in Los Angeles soon after it wrapped. That’s Jeffrey Wells, the proprietor of the savvy Hollywood Elsewhere movie-business site. On his blog he wrote:
“There have been a small handful of films that have portrayed rural boondock types and their tough situations in ways that are honest and real-deal. My top three are John Boorman’s “Deliverance,” Billy Bob Thornton’s “Sling Blade” and Lamont Johnson’s “The Last American Hero,” [“Above Suspicion”] certainly deserves to stand side-by-side as a peer … Noyce always delivers with clarity and discipline but this is arguably the most arresting forward-thrust action flick he’s done since “Clear and Present Danger.” Plus it boasts a smart, fat-free, pared-down script by “Mississippi Burning’s” Chris Gerolmo; some haunting blue-tinted cinematography by Eliot Davis (“Out of Sight,” “Twilight”) and some wonderfully concise editing by Martin Nicholson.” He added, “Above Suspicion” damn sure feels like an early ’70s film. I can tell you that. I mean that in the most complimentary way you could possibly imagine…”
Fair enough, then. The movie is currently streaming on Amazon’s Prime Video. Here’s a link to the book on Amazon.
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Next week: Fifty years ago, on November 9, 1971, the purportedly mild-mannered, intensely religious John Emil List massacred his wife, three teenaged children, and mother in their threadbare mansion New Jersey, and disappeared into thin air for eighteen years before he was finally caught living under a new identify. The case still resonates today.