Lots of Thoughts
Joyce Urbanski (Glenne Headly) and Cynthia Kellogg (Demi Moore) are not only business partners in the Clip n Dye beauty parlour but are best friends. And as such Cynthia has long been aware of the problems in the Urbanski marriage as Joyce's husband Jim (Bruce Willis) is a drunk and drug taker who not only steals money but beats her up. She's even aware that at times Joyce has considered killing him and even one time swapped the sugar for rat poison, something which lead Cynthia to save Jim's life which in gratitude he ended up bedding her. But then one night at a Carnival Jim is found dead and the friends decide to hide his body and cover up his death. But that is until just a couple of days later Cynthia ends up at the police station and spilling the beans over the troubled Urbanski marriage. But there are a lot of unanswered questions as to what happened that night.
"Mortal Thoughts" starts in quite a typical fashion as we watch Cynthia being questioned by two detectives (Harvey Keitel and Billie Neal) at the police station where she is filling them in about the Urbanski marriage. As such we have a series of flashbacks starting with Joyce and Jim's wedding as we see how abusive Jim is to her and then we get a series of scenes which details their destructive marriage all played out in front of Joyce. Straight forwards enough isn't it except of course it isn't as it can't be as simple as how it seems and we quickly realise this as we see that there are certain intentional gaps in the story.
The thing is that whilst all of this makes "Mortal Thoughts" interesting it is also too obvious too quickly. I don't mean that you can easily work out what is what even though ideas come to mind but far too quickly you realise things are not as clear cut as they first seem and it becomes a waiting game for it to start to reveal itself. In truth what I am saying is that the build up, the look at the Urbanski marriage could have been done quicker so as to get to the real meat of the movie which is not the build up but what happened the night Jim died.
The knock on effect of this is that for the first half hour "Mortal Thoughts" becomes dominated by the look of the actors. Now I don't mean so much Bruce Willis who is sporting a goatee but Demi Moore with big 80s hair and looking hot in every scene. It is a case of looking too good and not realistic for the character she is playing, not only that Alan Rudolph seems smitten with Demi Moore and gives us one scene after another of Moore looking beautiful. The knock on effect of this is that the other characters end u becoming noise around her. It's a shame that the build up takes too long and becomes to distracted with actors almost doing there own thing because when it does focus on the crime and the gaps it is okay.
What this all boils down to is that "Mortal Thoughts" is an interesting movie but spoiled partly down to a seemingly long build up but actors delivering over the top performances which dominate the scenes.
