Not only are “The Forgiven” leads Jessica Chastain and Ralph Fiennes among our very best actors, they have a timeless quality that leads one to believe they’d be stars in any era. I can easily picture Fiennes in a supporting role in, say, “Casablanca” (1942), while Chastain would seem right at home in a picture such as “Gilda” (1946) or “House of Strangers” (1949).
Chastain and Fiennes are perfectly cast as a privileged married couple who might still love each other but clearly can’t stand each other in John Michael McDonagh’s dark and lurid Moroccan film noir “The Forgiven,” which is set in present day but if we take out the cell phones and a few other modern touches, this, too, has a timeless quality and feels like something straight out of the 1940s. It’s a wonderful movie about mostly terrible people who treat the death of a local boy as an inconvenience that interrupts their weekend getaway and must be dealt with, and what a bother the whole thing is — and it’s that kind of attitude that can lead to some dire comeuppances.
