Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Grifters
1990 · Stephen Frears · The Grifters on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the film open with the screen split into three panels. (structure)
Frears introduces Roy, Lilly, and Myra each working a separate hustle in a separate panel before their stories converge.
Payoff: You are told upfront these three lives are about to collide. In the reading: convergent parallel montage. The reading calls this a convergent parallel montage, three separate lines the film promises will cross.
Notice how flat and sunlit the film's Los Angeles looks. (light)
Cinematographer Oliver Stapleton lights motel rooms, diners, and racetracks to feel banal rather than glamorous, resisting the shadowy look usually associated with noir.
Payoff: Betrayal lands harder for happening in ordinary daylight instead of shadow.
Notice how often red appears around Lilly. (light)
Color is used pointedly throughout, with Lilly repeatedly associated with reds and bruised tones that intensify as the story tightens.
Payoff: The color scheme quietly tells you who to watch and worry about.
Watch who sits, who stands, who controls the door. (staging)
The staging repeatedly triangulates Roy between the two women, with blocking encoding who holds power in the room.
Payoff: The power struggle is visible in the furniture arrangement before anyone raises their voice.
Watch Roy work the sailor con and notice every step he takes. (setting)
The film stages the short con with documentary patience, showing the method in full rather than skipping to the payoff.
Payoff: You learn the craft of grifting as the characters practice it. In the reading: crystalline description. The reading calls this a crystalline description: an image that builds its own small fake reality and quietly swaps it in for the real one.
Once you have seen it
Watch Cusack's face in his most emotional scenes with Lilly and Myra. (performance)
Roy is played as a blank the two women orbit, and the film holds him in frame long enough that you keep trying and failing to read what is underneath.
Payoff: The mystery of Roy is whether there is anything behind the mask at all. In the reading: affection-image / qualisign. Deleuze calls this a qualisign, a held face expressing a single quality rather than discharging into action.
Notice the sound design right before and during the final scene. (sound)
The most horrifying sound in the film is small and ordinary, followed by silence, rather than any musical cue building to it.
Payoff: The restraint makes the violence land as fact, not spectacle.
Notice which kind of con each character runs. (structure)
Roy's caution, Myra's ambition for one big score, and Lilly's grim institutional survival all follow from which kind of con each of them runs.
Payoff: The craft of grifting turns out to predict exactly how each of them ends up.
Carry this in: Watch the faces in the quiet scenes, not just the cons. That is where the film's real tension lives.