Masquerade movie review & film summary (1988)
Her character has not had an easy life. Her father died when she was 12, and her mother has died just a few months before the story opens. She lives in a mansion in the Hamptons (one of her nine homes) with her mother’s fourth husband, a drunken lout played with cheerful hatefulness by John Glover. She hates him, but there’s no way to get him out of the house; he’s protected by her mother’s will.
Back home after school, Olivia drifts into a round of idle days and evenings filled with parties and dances. She runs into Mike (Doug Savant), the boy she promised to marry when she was 12. He’s now one of the local cops, forever on the other side of the divide between the rich and the poor. “Some dreams don’t die,” he tells her, but she tells him gently that it wasn’t meant to be. Then one night at a dance she meets Tim (Rob Lowe), the handsome skipper of the racing sailboat owned by a local millionaire.
Tim has been sleeping with the millionaire’s wife, but it’s love at first sight when he sees Olivia. Before long they’re holding hands on the beach and even committing the ultimate transgression: public fraternization between members and employees at the yacht club.
Glover, the stepfather, is savage in his disapproval for the penniless sailor. He goes away for the weekend, the young couple sleep together in her house, Glover unexpectedly bursts in drunkenly, there is a struggle and Tim shoots him dead.
That’s what happens, all right, but what really happens is a lot more complicated. Because “Masquerade” depends upon its many surprises, I won’t reveal any more of the plot, except to say that Olivia tries to cover up for the man she loves, and Mike, the local cop, seems to go along with the coverup for complicated motives going back to his love for her.
If all of this sounds needlessly complicated (sort of a Deathstyles of the Rich and Famous), director Bob Swaim and writer Dick Wolf are surefooted in their storytelling. One by one, the curtains of deception and intrigue are pulled back, and the most tantalizing thing about their method is that they always keep young Olivia in the dark.
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