After watching “The Business of Strangers” with Stockard Channing tonight, I’ve hit on why independent movies are often so much better than Hollywood productions: ambiguity.
It’s this single quality that often means the difference between an OK movie and a good one, or a good one and a great one – at least for me. Hollywood wants to explain everything to you at every turn, and then wrap it all up in the final reel, neat and tidy. Well, I don’t want everything handed to me on a silver platter. I want to listen. I want to decide for myself what happened and why the characters did what they did.
After all, life is nothing so much as ambiguous. Nothing is black and white – everything is shades of grey. Everything. And that’s what makes it interesting.
And while you get the basic idea of “Strangers” in the first few minutes, how it unspools itself is unpredictable and, yes, ambiguous. Combine it with great performances by Channing and Julia Stiles, and you have at least a temporary antidote to “A Beautiful Mind” and its ilk. Highly recommended.