Lots Of Skin, but No Heart

BASIC INSTINCT Directed by Paul Verhoeven; Written by Joe Eszterhas

Some movies are so ferociously prejudged — sometimes because of costs that seem scandalous, sometimes because of controversies with pressure groups or the ratings board — that it becomes difficult to evaluate them fairly when they appear. One looks so chic (and so inside) airily dismissing something like Ishtar or Hudson Hawk. What fun for critics and show-biz reporters. And so easy too.

Basic Instinct is the latest candidate for admission to this inner circle of the cinema’s damned. Its script was bought for a record $3 million, and people immediately started saying nothing could be that good. Then location shooting was disrupted by gay activists claiming the film promoted a cruel stereotype — that lesbians are literally man killers. Finally, when the picture was finished, it was slapped with an NC-17 rating. After a few cuts (less than a minute’s worth) and many hot words, that was changed to an R, but such wrangles usually do irreparable box-office harm.

There’s no need to make a cosmic case against Basic Instinct. It’s just another entertainment that went more wrong than right. Maybe its script isn’t worth $3 million, but its basic premise is not a bad one. It proposes an untrammeled San Francisco woman named Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) who writes murder mysteries that have a nasty way of predicting actual crimes. They also provide, of course, a perfect alibi. No one in her right mind would create fictions that make their author a prime suspect.

That does leave a nice question: Is Catherine in her right mind? Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) doesn’t care. He’s a hot-tempered, danger-loving cop who learns, as he investigates a murder in which she is indeed the likeliest suspect, and falls in lust with her, that she intends to use him as the subject of her next book. But, hey, when the sex is this good, why should he pause to count its potential costs?

For that matter, why should we? In recent years the tameness and sameness of movie sex have become a bore, which is not a word anyone is going to apply to this film’s skin scenes. They may be offensive to some, but they will be a turn-on for others. And, by the way, Basic Instinct cannot fairly be termed antigay. Catherine is certainly bisexual, but it is just another aspect of her cultivated air of differentness, her love of high-risk games and shock effects, which Stone plays very well.

The real problems with the film lie elsewhere: in the chilly, self-conscious sleekness of its production design, in the heartless and relentless thrill seeking of Paul Verhoeven’s direction, in the too intricate, not entirely persuasive plotting required to create an alternate suspect, a police psychiatrist (Jeanne Tripplehorn) who truly loves Douglas. Finally, the film breaks faith with the most inviolable convention of the whodunit — refusing to state firmly which of the two women dunit (notwithstanding gay activists’ confident naming of one of them, in a publicity campaign aimed at undermining the movie). This reflects its fundamental flaw of arrogance, a smug faith in the ability of its own speed, smartness and luxe to wow the yokels. It is its attitude, not its morality, that ultimately undoes Basic Instinct.