How To Not Notice A "Peacock"

by Thomas M. Pender

Finally, someone saw something in actor Cillian Murphy that I saw from his very first frame in Batman Begins: effeminism.  I may have just invented that word, but it suits Murphy’s role in the tiny film Peacock to a “T.”  He’s never impressed me much with his acting.  He’s tried to be mysterious and foreboding in Batman as well as Red Eye, but to me, he’s always seemed like the scrawny, scared little boy trying to act tough . . . with negative results.

Here, in a film that I’d never heard of before it appeared on a Redbox screen, Murphy plays a small-town citizen in 1930s-esque rural America, who lives a very different kind of private life.  Whenever he steps outside of his house, he is John, a working average Joe with a fedora and a briefcase, but at home, he sometimes becomes Emma.  With a wig, a dress, high heels and some makeup applied to Murphy’s feminine cheekbones and lips, Emma runs the household.  For apparently years, John has resided in this town without anyone ever learning of Emma . . . until one day, when a train car comes off a nearby track and plunges into John/Emma’s yard.  Townsfolk gather to see what the ruckus is about, and a growing crowd of locals see her for the first time.

Not bizarre enough for you?  Get this: one citizen assumes that John has up and married secretly, and the whole town is thrilled for the young couple!  The buzz begins, and not only does everyone in town want to meet the new bride, but a senator decides to use the train accident as his soapbox, and wants John and Emma to host the speech.

Not once, not in one single scene, does one single character in this film seem suspicious of the fact that John and Emma look exactly alike!  Are you kidding me?  All “Emma” had to do was correct the first near-sighted dope who assumed she was John’s wife, and say she was his sister, and at least that would have made some sort of cinematic sense.

Here’s another poser: In ‘30s-esque rural America, exactly how many cross-dressing multiple-personality types do you suppose there were?  And is it possible for friendly everybody-knows-his-neighbors types to never discover that there is a woman living inside a supposed single man’s house over what seems to be many years?  No one saw Emma wash a dish or make an egg in the windowed kitchen?   When the train hits, “she” is outside getting the laundry off the line.  Has she never done this before, or does she only go outside when the entire town is off the streets?  No one even looks at Emma with a “Don’t I know you from someplace?” wince.  Not once.

For a tiny film, the cast is impressive: Susan Sarandon (Thelma & Louise, Dead Man Walking) plays the senator’s wife, who befriends the kitten-shy Emma, Ellen Page (Juno, Inception) is a girl from John’s past (who apparently also never caught him in a dress), and Josh Lucas (A Beautiful Mind, The Lincoln Lawyer) is the local law.  Aside from Page’s obvious Canadian accent, everyone fits rather well into this town.  The direction is decent for this wanna-be Psycho non-thriller, but that one glaringly obvious question overshadowed the entire plot for me.

If you don’t want your cast of characters to know of one particular character’s existence, you keep the secret character out of sight.  If, for some bizarre reason . . . like a train plummets into a yard! . . . the cast does learn of the secret character’s existence, they should probably notice right away that not only does this character look identical to another who happens to live in the same house, but the two are never seen together, and each make constant excuses for where the other one is.

As with many films, two or possibly even one rewrite could have saved a whole lot of disappointment in the logic department.  Then again, if no one in a town of hundreds notices that two characters are identical twins, maybe it’s not so shocking that two Hollywood writers (one of which directed) didn’t notice their huge mistake, either.