The Thomas Crown Affair

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The Thomas Crown Affair tosses a poser at its viewers: How do you rectify its slick, hollow action swagger with Rene Russo’s highly emotional and revelatory performance? This is, after all, the nature of exploitation cinema — take something genuine and meaningful, like a powerful performance or serious social issue, and dress it down into an amusement park ride fueled in part by the audience’s gut emotional reaction to the subject matter. And unless these dueling elements are somehow resolved, the result is an unbalanced film — if you were unfortunate enough to have seen it, think of how much more Charlize Theron brought to Devil’s Advocate than everyone else involved combined. But John McTiernan, director of The Thomas Crown Affair, resolves the disparity brilliantly, and the resolution thoroughly enriches the film. Its two action set pieces are spun around Thomas Crown’s (Pierce Brosnan) theft of a Monet from a major metropolitan museum, and it’s that theft that brings insurance investigator Catherine Banning (Russo) into the fray. She throws herself into her pursuit of Crown, even attributing their fiery romantic sparks to business. It’s that great recurring theme of the ’90s: You are your job. Thomas is his, and Catherine is certainly hers. More than other films, however, The Thomas Crown Affair raises this theme to the point of abstraction — it even does so explicitly, when Denis Leary’s weary cop tells Catherine that the NYPD won’t throw more money after the pursuit

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