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Synopsis

From the press notes:
"Quietly compelling." - Thew New York Daily News
"Frank Langella gives a note-perfect, tour de force performance." - Variety

Jimmy Stevens (Frank Langella), a senior VP for E.N. Corporation, sets up his own assassination after sending a damaging but anonymous email with deflated sales figures for his company and attaching a video-clip containing sinister images of a clandestine burial at the energy firm's factory in Latin America. In New York, the wheels of the corporation spin into action using contacts Teddy and Sammy from the underground to track down the whistleblower. Jimmy fears for his life, and using the pseudonym John Doe, hires Frank Turlotte (Elliott Gould), a private detective, to follow a man and track his movements. Disguising his voice, Jimmy does not tell Turlotte that the person who has hired him and the man he is to trail are one and the same. Increasingly obsessed with Turlotte's opinion of his life, Jimmy engages in a game of cat and mouse, phoning Turlotte each evening for a report and taunting him into discovering more and more details of his life. Jimmy eventually tells Turlotte that his job is over except for one more meeting in Redhook, Brooklyn. Turlotte is now intrigued enough to get to know Eileen (Laura Harring), a jazz singer and Jimmy's companion, and her seven-year-old daughter, Lila. Jimmy tells Lila a story about his childhood in 1940s France: One day towards the end of the war, Jimmy and his friend Lulu found a dying soldier in the woods. The soldier had requested that Lulu stay with him until his death. It was an episode that has haunted Jimmy ever since, and initiated his greatest wish, that he should not die alone.