MOVIE REVIEW : Unmasking a Life of Yearning

Occasionally, one performance marks a film forever. “Masquerade” (selected theaters) is a sleek romantic thriller, with its every detail of life among the very, very rich--and sometimes famous--ringingly right. This is evil under the most felicitous sun imaginable, corruption acted out in the perfection of a Southampton oceanfront “cottage,” whose spare, elegant rooms speak of uninterrupted decades of money.

A densely plotted affair about the yearning for money and the yearning for love, the film keeps a nicely ironic eye on its privileged, amoral young and not-so-young. But director Bob Swaim (“La Balance”) has saved his strongest ammunition for the leading role, a gentle, cripplingly rich young heiress who, under the spell of love, seems to unfold right before our eyes.

Meg Tilly is Olivia Lawrence and she does not take a false breath. The silken unwinding of her character from a cocoon of shyness takes you back a good long ways, to Joan Fontaine’s performance in “Suspicion,” and in these less innocent times, Tilly’s role is more complex and her work more finely drawn.

The recent death of her mother has left Olivia one of the East Coast’s richest young women. It’s also left her Tony Gateworth (the burning-eyed John Glover), her mother’s fifth husband, a sort of scummy residue from the bottom of the marital barrel. Lean, alcoholic, preternaturally nasty, Gateworth won’t quit the family estate, brings his own cool girlfriend around (Dana Delany, acidly good) to litter up the place, and has only filthy invective when the quiet Olivia begins to see a Hamptons newcomer, Tim Whelan (Rob Lowe).

Whelan and young policeman Mike McGill (Doug Savant) are the film’s two unmoneyed young. The equivalent of a seagoing ski bum, Whelan captains the racing sailboat Obsession for its rich, older owner, while bedding the owner’s petulant young wife (Kim Cattrall). McGill, nursing a crush on Olivia since grade school, has given up talk of law school for a berth on the local police force.

And almost nothing is what it seems. This is ‘80s film noir , but noir played by the very young, in the vivid colors and clean lines of a Bruce Weber photograph. The darkness is all below the surface. (The cameraman is the brilliant David Watkin, who’s done everything from ‘Yentl” to “Chariots of Fire,” and from “Out of Africa” to “Moonstruck.” His lenses make these pure oceanside settings into a watercolorist’s dream. And the effortlessly fine production design is by John Kasarda.)

Dick Wolf’s screenplay could have slipped over into melodrama in a second. But Swaim, American born and French trained, is too elegant a director for that and far too controlled. He goes for neat razor cuts, not great bloody chunks of melodrama. And so, like Polanski’s “Frantic,” the picture is full of small, impeccably realized roles--by Glover, Delany, Cattrall, Maeve McGuire as Olivia’s beautiful aunt--that together create an undercurrent of malaise beneath a glossy surface. (The film’s R-rating is for its nudity, sexual situations and brief violence.)

A lot also hangs on the growing love between the heiress and the seagoing stud. Whelan doesn’t know the meaning of the word guilt ; he’s simply been in the catbird seat his life long because of his looks and his suppleness with women. Now, possibly, he begins to feel the stirrings of decency and of real emotion. Because of the nature of the role, because we’re not meant to know what Whelan is thinking or feeling at any moment, Lowe’s casting works. And his pink-cheeked super-handsomeness seems to fit right in with the Eastern preppies and wired jaws. It isn’t a great performance, but it’s a start.

Besides, Swaim wisely keeps our attention on Tilly, and between them, actress and director build a whole world of wealth and privilege and emotional starvation. They understand that old money like this isn’t extended pinkies or “Dynasty”--it’s Olivia Lawrence’s dowdy clothes, her fogbound voice, her slightly klutzy walk . . . and her sure-footedness on her sailing boat, her authority among the old family lawyers. There are funny bits of observation too: the stiff-elbowed handshake of Gateworth’s condescending girlfriend, like the password of a secret society.

The way that Ivan Passer, Czech born, saw the Santa Barbara seats of power in “Cutter’s Way” is the way that Swaim--American, yet removed from American life--sees the Eastern Establishment. Chilling, very chilling.