Roxana Hadadi, film and tv critic for Vulture and New York magazine returns to the pod for another episode about Tony Gilroy, this time looking at his screenplay for Taylor Hackford’s kidnapping thriller from the year 2000,Proof of Life, starring top-billed Meg Ryan and the ascendant superstar Russell Crowe.

Crowe plays Terry Thorne, an Australian K&R (Kidnap & Ransom) consultant sent down to the fictional South American Republic of Tecala to negotiate the release of an American oil company engineer (David Morse) held hostage by anti-government forces in the Andes mountains, who finds himself falling for Morse’s distraught wife Meg Ryan.Proof of Life is best remembered today as the movie where Crowe and Ryan had an affair on location which doomed the movie to tabloid gossip; she was blamed for the end of her marriage to Dennis Quaid, and then for the financial failure of the film, leading to her decline as an A-list star.

Proof of Life feels like a laboratory for some of Tony Gilroy’s future works (for instance Crowe’s character is based on a real life Australian hostage negotiator named Thomas Clayton!); viewing it through aMichael Clayton lens reveals a film that might have been better were it not for the nervousness of the studio that led them to play down the chemistry between the leads and the film’s critique of co-operation between unethical corporations and corrupt governments in the Global South. It’s a great example of the “Five-Star Three-Star Movie” which time sometimes helps to reveal.

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Trailer forProof of Life (Taylor Hackford, 2000)

“Adventures in the Ransom Trade”, by William Prochnau, for Vanity Fair, the main source material for Tony Gilroy’s screenplay, April 1998