“I’ve prosecuted 43 murder cases. It’s always a horror; it’s always senseless. But of the murder cases I have prosecuted, this is the most horrible, the most senseless, the most indefensible. For $9.00. $9.00. $9.00, that’s all she had. Is this what we’ve become? Is the value of human life so cheap?”
At some point in her career, songstress Cher turned into a far more active actress than singer/recording artist. Make no mistake. She has captured both worlds like only Barbra Streisand had done before and Lady Gaga appears upon the cusp of doing now. Streisand and Cher are the only actresses with both an Oscar and a song at number one on Billboard’s record sale charts. Lady Gaga will likely become the third. Suspect, directed by Peter Yates, might have been a part of those first stepping stones. For a woman early in her acting career, she had three notable films release in 1987. That’s also the year she played Loretta in Moonstruck, playing along with John Mahoney, with whom she also guest stars here. Mahoney might be better known to his fans as the father to Frasier and Niles Crane in the Cheers spin-off Frasier. That same year brought us Cher in John Updike’s The Witches Of Eastwick, where she played Alexandra Medford. It was George Miller’s take on the classic novel and also starred Jack Nicholson, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer. The film is certainly worth a second look now that it’s out on Blu-ray from Mill Creek. It’s the weakest of her three 1987 films, but that’s more a credit to the other films, and it drew the lower box office of the trilogy of 1987 releases. So here’s why.
The film begin with a rather odd scene. We meet a Supreme Court justice who has casually wished staff a Merry Christmas and signed some rather routine letters and with the same routine calmness kills himself with a shotgun, of all things. We jump to find a homeless man played by a young, as yet pretty much unknown Liam Neeson discovers a woman’s body in the river. Soon the cops are violently removing him from the storm drain where he lives, and he’s facing arraignment for her murder. Enter Kathleen Riley, played by Cher, who is a public defender on her way to vacation. It’s her misfortune to be in the courtroom when the judge needs to assign a defender to the homeless man’s case. Riley is smart. She figures out his violence was the result of being deaf and mute. She starts to connect with him, and so we begin what appears as though it’s going to be another courtroom drama.Enter lobbyist Eddie Sanger, played by Dennis Quaid. He’s a smooth talker who will do anything to win a Congressional vote, which includes sleeping with a member of said Congress. He’s a real sleaze, but he’s not slick enough to get out of landing on the jury for Riley’s case. They say the flaw in our justice system is that we’re being judged by 12 of our fellow citizens who are too stupid to get out of jury duty. Now that we know how much he wanted out, you would assume Sanger will just go through the motions and try to get out as soon as he can. He doesn’t. He starts noticing things and feeding that info to Riley. In case you’re not up on your criminal law, take it from a guy who taught it for the better part of a decade. It’s called jury tampering, and it’s a felony. Of course, this might be a case of lawyer tampering. Not sure how this would be labeled, but it’s very illegal. Sanger doesn’t stop there. He starts to actively investigate the case in his free time, which usually jurors don’t have a lot of during a trial. The judge gets suspicious, and he’s about to be named to that newly vacant Supreme Court spot we saw open as the film began. He’s played by John Mahoney.
Director Peter Yates did a couple of smart things here. He let his Washington D.C. locations help to tell the story and provide the atmosphere. He also cast the film rather well. For Cher this was a breakout year for her as an actress. 1987 saw in her in three films which include this one, Moonstruck, where she also works with John Mahoney, and John Updike’s The Witches Of Eastwick. Suspect is, unfortunately her weakest of the three roles. If we hadn’t seen how good she was in the other two, we might have written off this singer-turned-actor, and Hollywood might have moved on. This film was weaker because the character was written badly. She never gets the chance to take any real bites out of her presentation, and even her final monologue falls pretty flat, because in the final act we finally see some links that should have been better developed throughout the film. Yates slogs in his pacing, and the film fails to embrace an identity. Is this a political thriller? Is it a mystery? Or is it the courtroom drama we half-expected? The answer is he doesn’t end up settling, and the films two hours hardly seem worth it after all.
Liam Neeson actually has the best role, and he takes full advantage of that. He can’t speak, so he has to emote like crazy, and he truly does. What’s more is that he makes a nice transition throughout the experience that matches the great physical transformation. When we first meet him, he was unrecognizable. Once he’s prepared for court, we finally see the actor, but by then he has established himself with his eyes. Long-time readers here know how much I love an actor who knows how to use their eyes. Carroll O’Connor was the best at this, and Neeson allows us to see the spark of the career he ends up having. I think it all really starts here. For Cher that moment has to come from the other two films, and indeed it does.
The film doesn’t contain any bonus features and works more for its place in cinema history than in any particular quality to be found here. For Cher 1987 was a big year, and she truly got to work those thespian skills. It became a nice second career, if not a way of life. “Life is what everybody else does.”
