Film review: Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Best Offer

A perfectly palatable slab of middlebrow melodrama from the writer-director of Cinema Paradiso.

Geoffrey Rush as the art expert Virgil Oldman, who prefers the company of his paintings to that of people in The Best Offer. Courtesy Warner Bros

The Best Offer

Director: Giuseppe Tornatore

Starring: Geoffrey Rush, Sylvia Hoeks, Jim Sturgess, Donald Sutherland

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A polished mix of romantic mystery and art-world thriller, the first English- language film by the Cinema Paradiso Oscar-winner Giuseppe Tornatore is a stuffy, contrived affair that delivers less suspense and depth than it initially promises. But it has compensations, notably Geoffrey Rush’s elegant presence, Ennio Morricone’s lush orchestral score and the handsome autumnal locations in a mysteriously unnamed Central European city. The Best Offer was filmed in Vienna, Prague and various Italian towns.

Rush gives a finely tuned performance as Virgil Oldman, a fastidious art expert and antique auctioneer who keeps his emotions in deep freeze, preferring the company of paintings over humans. But his heart gradually begins to thaw when he is summoned to value the family treasures of the reclusive young author Claire Ibbotson (Sylvia Hoeks), a chronic agoraphobe who will only speak to visitors through a tiny peephole in a locked safe room deep inside her crumbling villa. After a stormy start, Oldman and Ibbotson come to recognise each other as fellow damaged souls and begin a tentative romantic relationship.

Meanwhile, the silver-haired forger Billy Whistler (Donald Sutherland) continues to collude on an auction-house bidding scam that has helped Oldman amass his own clandestine collection of hugely valuable paintings, mostly vintage female portraits. Another friend, the mechanically gifted Robert (Jim Sturgess), is also hard at work reassembling an antique humanoid automaton from rusty, old cogs and joints that Oldman found in the dusty depths of Ibbotson’s villa. Throw in a dwarf with magical mathematical abilities (Kiruna Stamell) and The Best Offer starts to feel more like a heavily symbolic fairy tale than a naturalistic suspense drama.

Tornatore strains for novelistic depth and allegorical resonance, peppering his script with audience-nudging clues such as “there’s always something authentic concealed in every forgery”. He may also be alluding to Nicolas Roeg’s classic 1973 thriller Don’t Look Now, a mystery set in Italy that featured Sutherland and a nightmarish dwarf. But the final twist here is so long in coming, and so heavily foreshadowed, it hardly packs any shock value. The creaky dialogue also feels like it has been clumsily translated from Italian to English, an effect not helped by wooden performances among the minor characters.

The Best Offer is overlong, undercooked and hard to take seriously. Ultimately, Tornatore has given us an offer we can easily refuse. But for fans of Rush, and of old-fashioned European thrillers in general, this is a perfectly palatable slab of middlebrow melodrama.

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