Julianne Moore as Madeline in Sharper (2023)
We’re living in a golden age of scammers; rather than protecting us, the ubiquity and accessibility of personal data seems to have made us more vulnerable than ever to grifting. So it’s interesting that Benjamin Caron’s Sharper, a film about a group of alternately sympathetic and abominable con artists, feels as ageless as it does. Its immanent style – helped along by its breathless pace, genuinely surprising twists and lively ensemble cast – somehow seems both classic and contemporary, without leaning on old Hollywood genre tropes or obvious signifiers of modern-day relevancy.
Throughout Sharper’s five segments, each named after a character, there are multiple visions of love, men being scorned, and victims becoming perpetrators, explicitly or implicitly mirroring each other. While each vignette ostensibly represents its eponymous character’s point of view, those confines are frequently broken. The film opens with a quickie love story between Sandra (Briana Middleton) and Tom (Justice Smith), two bookish dorks with impeccable chemistry. Tom, it is soon revealed, is a bookstore owner and sometimes-fragile trust-fund kid begat by billionaire Richard Hobbes (John Lithgow), who has taken the J. Paul Getty approach to finance and fatherhood, sharing relatively little of his vast wealth with his offspring. As the film progresses, Tom’s emotional instability reveals itself to be perhaps more complicated (and earned) than that of a regular poor little rich boy – which makes his narrative in the early going that much more tragic. Sandra, who, before meeting Tom, was pulled out of the gutter and shown the ropes by professional conman Max (Sebastian Stan), also charts a unique ethical course that, to explore fully in this review, would give far too much away. Humanity, Sharper argues, is often very close to the surface of those you might otherwise ignore.
“You can’t cheat an honest man,” Max tells Sandra after she successfully bilks her first mark. Blessedly, this truism is the extent of the moralising that is spoken aloud; it also seems like the provocative, slick sort of thing thieves in movies say, but somehow doesn’t feel like pastiche. Stan nails Max’s psychopathic charm from his first moment on screen, but also chews the scenery just enough to liven things up. Julianne Moore, who plays Madeline, another master grifter who marries Richard at just the right time (i.e. close to death), meets the challenges of her performance – which includes performances within a performance – beautifully. (She also does a lot of magnificent crying; really, who cries like Moore?) Sharper is the neat, compact sort of film for adults that, while unlikely to make anyone’s best-of lists, is undeniably satisfying to watch.
► Sharper is available to watch on Apple TV+ now.