Screen Gems, Sony Pictures Entertainment Company, Rainforest Films present Idris Elba (Derek Charles), Ali Larter (Lisa), Bruce McGill (Joe Gage), Jerry O’Connell (Ben), Mathews Humpherys (Patrick), Nathan Myers (Kyle), Richard Ruccolo (Hank), Beyonce Knowles (Sharon Charles) Ron Rogge (Roger). Director, Steve Shill, John Badham; Writer, Steve Shill, David Loughery: Screenwriter, William Packer; Co-Producer, Nicolas Stern; Assoc. Producer, George Flynn; Producer, William Packer; Cinematographer, Ken Seng; Executive Producers, Jeffery Graup, David Loughery, DlennGainor, Damon Lee, Mathew Knowles Beyonce Knowles, Earvin Magic Johnson. © 2009.
I should give it to Idriss Elba in this opening paragraph on Obsessed. In an epoch when most men are bearded, scraggly, nose and ear pierced and both ringed and call it the “in crowd” as in “vogue;” facial hairs, mustaches, earrings, and top it off with tight pants that suffocate one’s crouches, I perceive, are suitable garbs for pirates of the Caribbeans. Elba stays cropped and gentlemanly clean-shaven. Elba dresses GQ. I admire that. Yet, that doesn’t move him from man’s damning follies that cause a happily married and family man’s damnation. As if he knowingly walks into his weakness, he bluntly says on camera in the first five minutes of screen time, and to Lisa, “Is this a setup?”
When Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) a happily married, up-and-rising New York lawyer, has a casual one-night fling with a book editor, Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), and their relationship turns into the most horrendous circumstance in Fatal Attraction (1987). Alex Forrest obsessively stalks Dan all over the city because she feels jilted and follows him to his house where his beautiful wife, Beth Gallagher ( Anne Archer), and daughter live. Creepy. Adrian Lyne’s directorial project received many awards for Fatal Attraction.
We can draw a parallel between Fatal Attraction and Obsessed, only that Derek Charles and Lisa Sheridan’s (Ali Larter) relationship, if there was any, was never consummated. And instead of Dan Gallagher standing up to the creepy Alex, in Fatal Attraction, Sharon (Beyonce Knowles) goes mano a mano with Lisa perishing when she falls from an upstairs terrace into the lamp and slams onto a glass coffee table on the ground floor, in Obsessed.
In a nutshell, Derek Charles has just got a fat account in his white-collar job, and he is buffeting in it and wallowing in the good life with a beautiful wife Sharon, and a healthy son, Kyle, and a new home in an upper-scale neighborhood. His life’s game plan is to retire at 35, jet by 40, retire on a private island, and own the Lakers by 50. Big plan and a bright future. Then the recent Temp, Lisa (Ali Larter), in his office, during a Christmas party orders him a “dirty martini.” And orders the bar attendant to make it “filthy.”
Derek’s trouble starts from the dirty martini. Lisa assumes Derek is responsive to her crush on him, despite the fact he is only encouraging her to focus on her life and work hard. Derek on the other hand, is mindful of his job and careful not to have outside commitments that would jeopardize his marriage. He never suspected that Lisa had become infatuated, delusional, and obsessed with him.
From then on, Lisa waylays Derek in the men’s bathroom at the Christmas party; then waylays him in the parking lot where she strips naked for Derek, and forces herself on him until he has to push her from his car. By now, Derek is in a pickle about the hanky-panky Lisa is causing to his peace of mind, but relieved when he learns that the Temp has quit. No, the temp quits because Derek told her he doesn’t want to jeopardize his job. When she had got enough of Derek avoiding her, she overdosed on Derek’s hotel room bed. Lisa has become suicidal.
She still follows Derek even at the men’s party, uninvited. And says imploringly, “Help me, Derek.”
“You know what, it doesn’t matter what you do or what you say or what goes on in that crazy brain of yours because there’s never gonna be anything between us.” Lisa stands in the wake of Derek, teary eyes looking in his wake. The next time, Derek finds Lisa in his hotel room drugged-up and overdosed to the point of self-suicide. As she pulls out of it, she goes on attacking the family home while both Sharon and Derek are out on Derek’s birthday celebration and moment of reconciling the trouble Lisa had caused them.
I cited earlier, a parallel plotline of Obsessed with Fatal Attraction, itself a water-down title in cinema history all over the world, same plots but coined and appended different titles to them. What is Alex’s attempt at suicide by slashing her wrist in Fatal Attraction is Lisa overdosing herself in Derek’s bed at the hotel, in Obsession. Alex’s stealing the Galleghers’ child and taking him to the playground is similar to Lisa’s entering the home of the Charles and forcing her into Kyle’s room upstairs. She leaves Kyle in his Mercedes Benz passenger backseat with ruby red lipstick emblazoned on his forehead. Imagine when Dan almost warns Alex that this is going to stop, and she says, “No, it’s not gonna stop. It will go on and on….I am not gonna be ignored!” “Don’t put this all on me. We both know what we are getting into,” Lisa would say to Derek.
The producers of Obsessed, make Sharon into a humble housewife, with no glam, hence, light on her in all her scenes is low-key, with the intent of domesticating her into one of those Southern wives who succumbs to their husbands to an unbelievable extent. Hear her in the scene urging Derek to eat, before going out. Three times she urged. But like a true Southern housewife, her anger at Derek upon her discovery that Charles was going out with Temp in his office, she let it all out: “Get out of my house!” Derek: “You know what, I want you to tell me what you want me to do.” First I will suggest you pack your toothbrush. And then I want you to get your socks, your shaving kit, your underwear, your prophylactics, if you think you will need them. Get your ass out!” An angry black woman, right now.
The spectacular ending of Obsessed, still leaves me cringing in my skin, for the creepy feelings and a sure pity for the villain, Lisa but the Writer achieves his level of ambition because he focuses on the structure and habits of the human mind, for the human mind is the motor that carries the message of the writer to its finished line.