A Bigger Splash

Even when he stars in comedies, Ralph Fiennes can't help but be serious.

Much of the humor from The Grand Budapest Hotel arose from Fiennes' hotel concierge's persistent fastidiousness in the face of escalating absurdity.

So it's a jolt to see him play a goofy, but unrepentant party animal in A Bigger Splash. Having nailed Shakespeare as easily as he mastered menace as Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter movies, the Welsh actor obviously has range, but nobody until Italian director Luca Guadagnino has ever asked him to dance giddily to The Rolling Stones' "Emotional Rescue."

Of course, maybe because it's Ralph Fiennes instead of Seth Rogen enjoying every single hedonistic moment that comes his way, it's hard to miss a consistent sense of dread lurking in the sunny, picturesque Sicilian scenery.

If Fiennes' Harry Hawkes shows up unannounced, he greets others with smiles and hugs, but it's reasonable to suspect that he isn't barging in on singer Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton, who starred in Guadagnino's I Am Love) and her documentarian boyfriend Paul De Smedt (Matthias Schoenaerts) simply to gaze at the landscape.

On his arm is the young Penelope (Dakota Johnson), who turns out not to be the middle-aged music producer's latest paramour, but his daughter. Apparently, seeing Harry with a young woman who isn't hanging around for transactional purposes is immediately suspect.

Harry may be fun to hang around with, but his openly crass manner can get old. It also doesn't help that he and Marianne were once an item and enjoyed sharing lines of Bolivian marching powder. Getting off of Harry's party train isn't that easy.

Marianne is recovering from throat surgery and can't offer him the loud retorts he sometimes needs to stay out of trouble. While Marianne may like living with Paul because he avoided the vices that used to fuel her, he isn't as comfortable with his emotions as Harry seems to be, so naturally he sees the loudmouthed producer as a threat.

By featuring Fiennes and the normally verbally acute Swinton in atypical roles, Guadagnino manages to keep A Bigger Splash from slipping into routine. While we're right to feel a sense of something dire on the breathtaking horizon, having his leads deviate from their conventional roles makes it a little harder to anticipate what exactly will go haywire. In addition, with all the secrets that characters keep from one another but inadvertently reveal to the audience, the foreboding feels more authentic.

It also doesn't hurt that Swinton's distinctively otherworldly bearing makes her believable as a sort of P.J. Harvey-type singer even if we barely hear her vocalize. Schoenaerts' brooding manner is just about right for Paul, and Johnson is far more convincing at playing a young woman who shares her long absentee father's hedonism than as a neophyte BDSM subject in Fifty Shades of Gray.

In this case, better material certainly helps.

In remaking the 1969 Jacques Deray thriller La Piscine, Guadagnino paces A Bigger Splash languidly but manages to make a vacation spot look menacing. He uses offbeat point-of-view shots to indicate something is amiss. When we see what the world looks like when the sunglasses come off, there's a sense that all isn't well. For all the skin and sunshine in A Bigger Splash, Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich (True Story) manage to make charming places and beautiful people seem pretty unsettling.

MovieStyle on 05/27/2016