Twilight.

Mr. Simon is NR's film critic.

SOME years ago Robert Benton, Richard Russo, and Paul Newman came up with a winner, Nobody's Fool, and here they are with another one, Twilight, directed by Benton, co-written by him and Russo, and again starring Newman. This time, though, it's a very different story, about rich, amoral people in Los Angeles, part detective thriller, part romantic triangle (sort of), part chronicle of complicated friendships and betrayals, a way-we-live-now morality tale.

Adroitly mixed, these elements coexist remarkably. At the center is Harry Ross (Newman), once a cop, then a private eye, who manages to track down, in the film's prologue, the runaway daughter of wealthy Jack and Catherine Ames (Gene Hackman and Susan Sarandon). The underage girl, Mel (Reese Witherspoon), is living it up in Puerto Vallarta with a boyfriend, Jeff (Liev Schreiber), until Harry comes to fetch her home. Jeff tries to stop him, there's a fracas, and Mel picks up a gun dropped by Harry and shoots him in the leg.

A couple of years later, Harry has given up detective work and is living with the Ameses as a handyman, apparently doing nothing much besides playing cards with Jack and yearning for Catherine. Jack is ill, diagnosed as having a maximum of ten months to live. He and Catherine fell in love when she, a movie actress, was married to a man who soon died somewhat mysteriously, perhaps a suicide. His body was never found. Catherine and Jack married and lived happily until illness struck.

Strange things start happening as Jack asks Harry to deliver a money package to a certain Gloria Lamar. You don't have to be a movie buff to guess that anyone called Gloria Lamar is bad news, and that delivering a small brown package spells black calamity. And here, though I hate doing this to you, I must stop giving away plot.

But I can tell you much else. First, that Twilight, like L. A. Confidential, is a rare crime story that makes sense, its parts not only fitting together but also understandable to non-experts at solving movie mysteries. Yet one does not guess what comes next, and legitimate surprises jostle one another. There is no Quentin Tarantino cuteness, Stephen King horror, or (fill in the name) overcomplication and confusion. It all feels as natural as a movie about a boy and his dog. Actually, more so.

Though the characters are not presented fully in the round, enough is there in the aptly sophisticated dialogue and telling observation to elicit your intensely concerned involvement. And there are other characters of interest. There is Verna (Stockard Channing), a police lieutenant with whom Harry once had an affair, now investigating a murder in which he is somehow implicated. There is Reuben (Giancarlo Esposito), an amiably bumbling young Hispanic, who sometimes assists Harry, with limited usefulness. There is Raymond (James Garner), a tough old friend of both Jack's and Harry's, who . . . but I'm getting too discursive again.

Twilight is an apt title. Most of the action takes place late in the day or at night, or in interiors elegantly underlit. More to the point, the moral chiaroscuro: the lovely but hard Catherine, the jovial but devious Jack, the stalwart but fallible Harry, the mixed-up Mel, the ambivalent Verna, and so on. These incertitudes are marvelously caught by Piotr Sobocinski's sublime camera work. The film looks ineffably sumptuous without the least glossiness, glitziness, or apparent studiedness. Nothing obstructs the joyously colorful variety of things, obscures that numinous or transcendent something in a bit of nature, furniture, or architecture. Or in the people: their lived-in faces and bodies, their touching imperfections and compelling asymmetries.

Benton's direction is ungimmicky yet never obvious: camera angles, movements, compositions are a little more than ordinary but less than recherche. The pacing is uncannily right, neither hurried nor slack. Despite necessary foreshortening, the film's time feels real. And you believe the actors. Doubts have been voiced about the age differences between Miss Sarandon and her men. But nothing feels unnatural. Hackman has one of those grittily eloquent faces, unbeautiful but solidly, agelessly virile. Newman, formerly rather too handsome, has aged into graceful credibility: bearable good looks, like those of a very fine used car. And Miss Sarandon, whose loveliness was always a bit overripe, has receded into just ripeness. Neither young nor old, neither flawlessly beautiful nor tangibly imperfect, she is earthily feminine but with a hint of hidden fragility -- infinitely desirable.

All three act sovereignly; so, too, the supporting cast -- in particular Miss Channing of the all-encompassing gaze -- is always on the mark. Even Elmer Bernstein's music, like Joseph G. Aulisi's costumes, remains smartly inconspicuous. Twilight knows exactly what it is about but, best of all, knows it with exemplary unself-consciousness.