GEORGETOWN

Waltz, Redgrave, Bening

GEORGETOWN (2019). Director: Christoph Waltz. 

Ulrich Mott (Christoph Waltz), a hustler in Washington D.C., marries a much older woman, Elsa ( Vanessa Redgrave), a wealthy widow, socialite and author who lives in a beautiful Georgetown townhouse. One night Elsa is found dead, and Elsa's daughter, Amanda (Annette Bening), who wasn't crazy about Ulrich, waits until the autopsy report -- it was homicide -- before going ballistic. A series of flashbacks show how Ulrich met and wooed Elsa, his life of lies and delusions, his secret gay activities, and his forming a snooty non-governmental agency with Elsa's help so he can mingle with the movers and shakers of political society. But did he kill Elsa, and if he did will he get away with it?

Wedded bliss? Waltz with Redgrave

This engaging, totally absorbing, and very well-acted movie -- Redgrave is especially marvelous but everyone is wonderful -- is based on the true story of Albrecht Gero Muth and his wife Viola Drath. The highlights of the film include the operatic quarrels engaged in by husband and wife, especially when she catches him in bed with a man in their hotel room, and when she confronts him with the truth of what he's been doing for the past two years when he was supposedly being heroic in Iraq. Because Waltz was 65 when he made the film -- although he looks and plays younger -- it isn't clear what a huge age gap there was between the couple who met when Muth was only in his twenties and she was about 70. 

Verdict: Okay, hardly a B movie and not noir, but decidedly a kind of murder mystery with class. ***.