Storyline for 'The Grifters':
When con artist Roy Dillon (Cusack) is visited by his Mother, Lilly (Huston), who is also a con artist, she sends Roy off to the hospital because of a blow to the gut he suffered while working the grift. Roy's girlfriend, Myra (Bening), the third con artist, comes to visit Roy, and we discover that Lilly and Myra don't get along. After he is released from the hospital, Roy and Myra go on a little trip, where he is propositioned to be partners in crime with Myra. Everything soon falls apart for the three con artists, which leads to a bloody climax. | Roy Dillon's (John Cusack) life is turned upside down when a con job goes bad. His estranged mother, Lilly (Anjelica Huston), who happens to be on the lam, reunites with her son to oversee his health care, only to be faced by Roy's headstrong, competitive, con-artist girlfriend Myra Langtry (Annette Bening). Myra does her best to win over her man in Stephen Frears's darkly funny and intricately layered look at life's seedy side. | Annette Bening twists like a mink on a leash through Stephen Frears's adaptation of Jim Thompson's novel. This may be the perfect trope for the moral hysteria that coils around a mother, her son, and his girlfriend in this slender but highly pleasurable neo-noir. Small in effect and local in scope, the film is about small-fry, attractive, bloodless con artists who view the world as neatly split between ropers and suckers, grifters and squares. "Grifter's got an irresistible urge to beat a guy that's wise," an old-timer tells Roy (John Cusack). And yet the three characters here played by Angelica Huston, Cusack, and Bening only beat the innocent: Lilly (Huston) gigs at the track for a mobster named Bobo, putting wads of cash on long-shot horses to even out the odds. Roy, her son, swindles citizens by dimes and degrees, flashing twenties at bars then paying for his beer with tens. His girlfriend, Myra (Bening), is hustling herself, her salad days as a long-con roper behind her. Theirs is a world of gut punches and smart lines, and the adrenaline these cheats and chiselers live by is palpable onscreen. But a larger canvas? Maybe it's there as a parallel universe. "What do you sell again?" Myra asks Roy, the matchbook salesman. "Self-confidence," he says, a wry allusion to the confidence game all three of them are playing. The movie boasts dazzling turns by Bening, Cusack, and especially Huston, whose mere fatale breaks new ground for noir. Lyall Bush
