Betty McLeish (Helen Mirren) is a widow in her 70s who lives in a home full of tasteful pastel furniture in a calmly boring suburb of London. She’s sweet, pretty, pert, and polite, with glowing ski…
) is a widow in her 70s who lives in a home full of tasteful pastel furniture in a calmly boring suburb of London. She’s sweet, pretty, pert, and polite, with glowing skin framed by an impeccable gray-white coif; if Doris Day had been a conventional middle-class Englishwoman, she might have looked and acted like this.
“The Good Liar” is adapted from Nicholas Searle’s 2016 novel , and it has been directed, by the gifted and eclectic Bill Condon , as a delectably clever and civilized entertainment that invites us to be as invested in the game as we are in the characters. The way the movie works, Mirren plays Betty not as a sap but as a smart woman of solid values, whose trust in people is a projection of her own good nature.
Roy is a con artist, with a courtly personality that’s a total fraud, and the truth may be even darker. Yet just as Hitchcock, in “Shadow of a Doubt,” got the audience to identify with Joseph Cotten’s lethal Uncle Charlie, “The Good Liar” draws us into Roy’s web, so that we watch with a coldly admiring fascination as he sets his traps.
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