Above Suspicion: Reality-based, Kentucky fried noir is a curious failure and an overreach for Emilia Clarke
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C
A reality-based hillbilly thriller that can’t decide what flavour of noir to serve up, Above Suspicion is one of those curious failures that the current appetite for home streaming often rescues from theatrical limbo.
Its chief attraction is to show how far afield Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke is willing to go to leave the “Mother of Dragons” behind.
The answer is about 6,500 kilometers, to the dying mining towns of Appalachia, there to adopt a Kentucky-fried accent, and play a drug-addicted trailer park femme fatale. You can see the concentration of that dramatic juggling act on her face, which unfortunately distracts from accepting her as a drug-addicted, vengeful trailer park femme fatale.
FBI agent Jack Huston and informant Emilia Clarke have an inappropriate relationship in Above Suspicion.
Her passing resemblance to Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone aside, Clarke is miscast. But she’s not all that is wrong with Above Suspicion, a film that falls considerably short of director Phillip Noyce’s best (Rabbit-Proof Fence, The Bone Collector).
The movie is based on the lurid 1989 murder of Susan Smith, a drug informant in Pikeville, Ky. The confessed murderer, Mark Putnam (played here by Jack Huston) was the very same FBI agent who convinced her to turn witness against the bank robber buddy of her drug-dealing ex-husband Cash (Johnny Knoxville).
Their protector relationship soon crossed the line, and their affair, and her efforts to keep the married-with-child straight-arrow agent in her thrall, ignited his dark side.
The plot is told (and overtold) by the victim herself – a trope going back to Sunset Boulevard - starting with the opening line, “The worst thing about bein’ dead, ya got too much time to think.”
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A story that needs to be explained rather than shown usually indicates script problems. And the frequent narrative tidbits the late Susan Smith offers up don’t get much deeper than that (“You show me a guy who’s working too hard, and I’ll show you the woman he’s runnin’ from.”).
Noyce works hard to create a believable Ozark/Justified vibe, again, maybe too hard. When Putnam’s local police partner Randy McCoy (Austin Hébert) is on a stakeout, waiting to catch the bank robber in the act, he sits in a deserted building picking bluegrass tunes on his guitar. (In general, most of the male characters look like Seattle grunge rockers, or Daryl from The Walking Dead.)
As for the drugs, many lines are inhaled, and the high is stereotypically represented by disorienting, out-of-focus quick-cuts. None of this manages to make Clarke look as downscale as she’s supposed to be. Other than in the aftermath of some scenes of violence, she looks pretty unscathed for someone who’s supposed to have been through what she’s been through.
Some good actors are underused. Thora Birch has a couple of thankless scenes as Susan’s sister Jolene, a hair-dresser who mostly functions as her sounding board.
And Sophie Lowe, as Putnam’s wife Kathy, makes the most of her limited screentime, demonstrating the pragmatism of a spouse who knows her husband is unfaithful and can live with that. Heck, she can even rationalize his committing murder. She seems like a complicated character who could have contributed more heft to this tawdry story.
Above Suspicion. Directed by Philip Noyce. Written by Chris Gerolmo from the book by Joe Sharkey. Stars Emilia Clarke, Jack Huston and Johnny Knoxville. Available on VOD and BluRay, Tuesday, March 16.