Very disappointing...

Great Film overall

An Exercise In Nonsense

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Tim Whalen (Rob Lowe) is a yachting stud having an affair with his boss's wife Brooke (Kim Cattrall). They live in the upscale town of Southampton, Long Island. Olivia Lawrence (Meg Tilly) is a young heiress after her mother's death. She returns home after college and gets involved with Tim. She is forced to live with her alcoholic gambling debt-ridden stepfather Tony Gateworth (John Glover), and his girlfriend Anne Briscoe (Dana Delany). On the surface, Tim and Tony don't get along but they actually have a scheme to kill Olivia. Tim starts to have cold feet but Tony threatens him. In the planned break-in, Tim kills Tony and Olivia insists on taking the blame as self-defense. Her love-lore friend Officer Mike McGill (Doug Savant) turns a blind eye to incriminating evidence.It's a twisty murder scheme conspiracy. The movie suffers as one thinks about it too much. It's highly questionable why Tim does any of it. How could he ever guarantee he'd be paid in the original plan? I buy into Meg Tilly's cluelessness. She's probably the only one that makes sense. The various wills and legality need to be better explained. Also the schemes seem to be so many excuses to advance the plot. My biggest problem is that the movie tries too hard to overload the overwrought melodrama. It becomes too cloying and tiresome. And that music just won't stop.

If Masquerade had been filmed about 30 years earlier, it would have been directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starred Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. The storyline is very Hitchcock. Enchanting heiress Meg Tilly is never really sure who truly loves her and who is after her money. Surely her drunken, salacious stepfather John Glover and his trampy mistress Dana Delaney fall into the latter category. The current lawman Doug Savant seems to be carrying a torch for her, but Tilly is soon all eyes for local gigolo Rob Lowe, who dumps rich married Kim Cattrall and sweeps Tilly off of her feet into a whirlwind romance and marriage. And then Tilly starts having near misses on her life.Although the film fails to reach its full potential, there is a lot to recommend it, particularly for fans of the genre. The beautiful Hamptons scenery and the foray into the lifestyles of the rich and famous chief among them. The screenplay is well thought out and, starting from the two-thirds mark, twists and turns all over the place, but without losing its credibility. While Bob Swaim's direction is sometimes flaccid and allows the pace to slacken a bit too often, it usually regains its composure within a reasonable timeframe.Glover and Delaney have a blast in their roles. And there is strong support from Savant as the local lawman with a fancy of his own for Tilly. Cattrall has a largely thankless task - she gets to doff her duds and engage in sex scenes with Lowe to establish his credentials as a gigolo - but her character ends up being excess baggage with not even a tenuous relation to the main plot.The leads are a mixed bag. Tilly is quite wonderful as the heiress. She nicely walks the line between naivete and savvy - never making her heroine too suspicious, but not making her a pushover either. We believe her that she is in love with Lowe and we believe that she has the smarts to navigate her way through the various treacheries that litter her life. It is a rock solid performance and it is a shame that she is no longer acting. By contrast, Lowe is no Cary Grant. I have nothing against Lowe, but he performs much better in support or an ensemble cast than when called upon to lead the way. He is an attractive, amiable, but not especially charismatic leading man. As eye candy that would attract both Tilly and Cattrall, Lowe is semi-believable and contributes a couple of welcome nude scenes. However, when he needs to communicate some of the mystery of the man in question, his performance falters. The screenplay really needs us to wonder whether this guy really loves Tilly or may be trying to murder her - and we do wonder. Unfortunately, we wonder because the screenplay prompts us and because Lowe is often so vacuous in important moments that it is impossible to tell what, if anything, he is feeling. By the time the film concludes and provides us with our answer, we realize that Lowe's performance has laid no groundwork for the denouement. His acting here provides such limited impact/emotion that we have nothing invested in his character outside of what his plans for Tilly may be. Savant's supporting character actually ends up being more intriguing and better acted than the lead. This is truly a case where the film would have benefited from a stronger actor in the lead role.That said, fans of the genre will still find much to enjoy and admire here.

"Masquerade" is a crime thriller set among the wealthy inhabitants of the Hamptons, a socially exclusive part of Long Island. The main character is Olivia Lawrence, a young heiress who has been left tremendously wealthy by the recent death of her mother. (Olivia's father has died several years earlier). Olivia forms a relationship with Tim Whalen, a yacht skipper, but this causes friction with her stepfather Tony Gateworth, who suspects that Tim is only interested in Olivia for her wealth. There may be something in his suspicions, as Tim is also carrying on with attractive older woman Brooke, his employer's wife. Gateworth's objections to Tim, however, seem hypocritical, as it is obvious that he only married Olivia's mother for her money and has lost no time since her death in moving his new mistress, Anne, into the family mansion.The title is significant. "Masquerade" is the name of Olivia's yacht, but the word "masquerade", literally a masked ball, can also signify a charade or pretence, and several of the characters are pretending to be something they are not, pretences which are revealed in a series of twists. Tim and Gateworth seem to hate one another, but it is suddenly revealed that they are plotting together to murder Olivia for her money. During a confrontation between Gateworth, Tim and Olivia, however, Gateworth is killed when his pistol goes off during a struggle with Tim. Officer McGill, a local cop and former boyfriend of Olivia, is put in charge of the investigation into Gateworth's death.There are no really outstanding acting performances in this film, but Meg Tilly makes a convincingly innocent Olivia, even though at 28 she was several years older than her character. Rob Lowe does enough to show that he was more than just a Brat Pack pretty-boy, even though he shows enough flesh to keep his most ardent female fans happy. (Tim is supposed to be older than Olivia, but in reality Lowe was four years younger than Tilly). There are certain similarities between this film and "Wild Things", a thriller from 1998, which also has a plot involving yachting and differences in social class. (That film, however, was set in Florida rather than Long Island). "Masquerade", however, is by far the better of the two films, and part of the reason, I think, lies in the way in which the thriller genre developed over the intervening ten years. Although the plot of "Masquerade" contains several twists (there are a couple more after those mentioned above), it always remains perfectly comprehensible. By 1998, however, there was a tendency (one which has continued into the twenty-first century) for the scriptwriters of films like these to demonstrate their cleverness by devising excessively complicated plots; that of "Wild Things" contains so many twists that it ends up twisted out of all recognition, and almost totally incomprehensible to the average viewer, even with the assistance of a series of flashbacks interspersed with the closing credits and intended to make good all the numerous plot holes in the actual movie. Pauline Kael described "Masquerade" as a "tranquil and sophisticated thriller". "Tranquil" may seem an odd choice of adjective to describe a thriller, especially one in which several characters meet violent deaths, yet I know what she meant. "Masquerade" lacks not only the silly-cleverness that mars films like "Wild Things", it also lacks the cynical amorality that is their stock-in-trade. Towards the end I was waiting for some truly devastating silly-clever twist, like Olivia 's mother and Gateworth both coming back from the dead, or Olivia turning out to have planned the whole thing with her lesbian lover Brooke. Yet nothing like this happens. The twist is that there is no twist. There is no assumption that an obviously innocent person must be guilty; Olivia turns out to be just as sweet and naïve as she has always seemed. Moreover, Tim, whatever his original motives may have been, turns out to have genuinely fallen in love with her and selflessly sacrifices his own life while saving hers. It comes as quite a surprise to come across a thriller that does not take a completely cynical view of human nature. 7/10

Masquerade is a really good Hitchcockian type of thriller, a combination of Suspicion and The Heiress in which sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia DeHavilland brought aspects of Meg Tilly's character in their Oscar winning performances. It was shot on location in the ritzy Hamptons of Suffolk County, in fact the plot is about the haves and have nots of the area. And that's an area where the haves have PLENTY.One of those haves is Meg Tilly heir to a $300,000.000.00 fortune. She's a nice kid who properly wonders whether the men who court like her for her or bank account.She's got one leach of a stepfather in John Glover, a character you just love to hate. But by the terms of her mother's will she can't get rid of him until she's 21. And he's a guy who's used to a very high lifestyle.Tilly's also got two men in her life. Local boy Doug Savant whose father works in the shipyard on the yachts of the rich and famous who has joined the town police force. He's been crushing out on her since he was a little kid. But the Hamptons do have their own caste system.And then into her life comes Rob Lowe, the handsome and mysterious stranger who captains Brian Davies yacht and on the side kanoodles with his wife, Kim Cattrall. He puts the moves on Tilly and since its Rob Lowe, who could blame a girl.Tilly's the innocent here, that's a constant, but as the story continues and several murders take place, she doesn't know who to trust. You won't know because the plot takes several twists and the motives of the persons in the cast change over the course of the film.For those of you Rob Lowe fans of both genders you can have ample opportunity to see him in several stages of undress with Kim Cattrall and Meg Tilly. He's also got an interesting scene with Doug Savant who looks pretty good himself that takes on some homoerotic overtones. What beautiful children those two would have if possible.The title Masquerade refers both to the name of the Tilly family yacht and the fact that except for Tilly, a lot of these characters are not as they appear on the surface. Masquerade is a really good thriller of a film, don't miss it when it is shown.