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The twin pillars of Zero’s detective work, objectivity and observations (“the two obs, as I call them”), start to crumble a little when he meets his Irene Adler in the exceedingly crafty Gloria Sullivan (Kim Dickens). Zero quickly pegs Gloria as the blackmailer, but in the process of figuring out her motives, he becomes smitten. Save maybe for Zero’s sleuthing scenes, their spiky relationship is the best thing about Zero Effect, and it falls under a small but grand movie tradition I call “the cat-and-mouse romance.” Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 screwball comedy Trouble In Paradise, about the interplay between thieves, is the classic example; in a key scene, they fall for each other by picking each other’s pockets over dinner. And it surfaced again recently in the underrated Duplicity, about opposing corporate-espionage agents who are turned on by deception. Cat-and-mouse romances are built on mutual respect and professional admiration, yet they’re inherently unstable, because each person is naturally trying to put one over on the other. There’s great chemistry to found at the intersection of attraction and distrust, and it transforms Zero from an antisocial misfit with a brilliant analytical mind to a (relatively) smooth operator who can’t see the case as clearly as he’d like.

At nearly two hours flat, Zero Effect could stand some tightening, and it tends to fall slack whenever it leaves Zero’s immediate orbit. In contrast to the uneasy back-and-forth between Zero and Sullivan, there’s no mystery to Arlo’s relationship with his henpecking would-be fiancée (Angela Featherstone); she wants Arlo to end his peculiar dedication to a boss who exasperates him, and pay more attention to her. Pretty straightforward. Kasdan tries to give Arlo some dimension by exploring why, say, he would abandon his girlfriend at a moment’s notice just to fly to Portland for a pay-phone conversation. But that’s only interesting insofar as it relates to Zero and the lure of being close to such a singular personality. How it affects Arlo’s dull domestic life doesn’t mean anything.

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Fortunately, Zero Effect gets jolted back to life whenever Kasdan brings the focus back to that Doyle quote, and digs into the genius of Zero’s unconventional methods and all the problems that go along with them. In one great ironic moment, Zero gets up in arms about his clients being “victims of schemes,” yet his current client is most likely a murderer. He’s like the perfect private investigator: blind to any moral considerations, devoted to the ins-and-outs of cracking cases. To that end, Kasdan writes one of the most ingenious gumshoes in movie history, a man capable of discerning a woman’s occupation through a whiff of iodine, reading stress levels through shaving nicks, and in the film’s signature sequence, gleaning clues from the mattress dimensions at a 30-year-old crime scene. In a just world, Daryl Zero would be appearing in his eighth sequel by now.

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Next week: Requiem For A Dream
January 28: Man Bites Dog
Coming in February: The Newest Cult Canon Month, featuring Synecdoche, New York; The Fall; Let The Right One In; and The House Of The Devil