Faking it | 22 November 2012

The star of Gambit, it seems, is the Savoy. And why not? Nobody else seems to want to lay claim to this movie, a refashioning of the 1966 art con caper that starred Michael Caine. Not even Colin Firth, who spends a fair amount of time in the new film unhappily legging it, trouserless, up and down the hotel’s refurbished corridors.

If you want to make an artistic copy, it had better be really good or you might as well not try, is the inadvertent message of this film. Scriptwriters the Coen brothers have taken the basic elements of the vintage Caine vehicle, which also had Shirley Maclaine, and made a crude sketch whose plot is paper-thin and whose characters are pencilled in. It’s a shame because, besides Firth, Gambit also boasts Cameron Diaz, Alan Rickman, Tom Courtenay and Stanley Tucci — and all their star power is wasted on the hammy lines and half-hearted plot. Everyone seems to be phoning in their performance from a more interesting movie set somewhere else.

Firth plays Harry Deane, a tweedy art curator who can no longer stand working for his overbearing boss Lord Lionel Shahbandar (Rickman), the richest man in England and an ardent fan of Impressionism. Deane concocts a scheme to trick Shahbandar into purchasing a fake Monet (one of the ‘Haystacks’ series). To do so, he recruits rodeo winner P.J. Puznowski (Diaz) who, one surmises, had been blissfully happy until then plucking chickens on a Southern farm. Deane wants the smart-talkin’, homily-spoutin’ Puznowski to come to London and pose as a woman whose grandfather liberated a Monet painting after the second world war. She is to say that she’s had a ‘Haystack’ sitting in her family home all the while. The painting, of course, will be a fake — done by the master forger known as the Major (Courtenay).