5 posts categorized "Historic Drama"

January 07, 2014

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.ColeSmithey.comThis ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

ColeSmithey.com

 

A Mistress to Dickens
Ralph Fiennes Does Merchant-Ivory with Felicity Jones

Invisible WomanShe walks in long skirts at a swift tempo across the windswept ocean shoreline every morning, traveling to her job as an elementary school drama teacher at a Protestant school. Hers is a mission of deep secrecy imposed by the 19th century’s greatest Victorian novelist.

Nelly Ternan (played by Felicity Jones) no longer holds in her heart and mind the reverence she once had for Mr. Charles John Huffam Dickens. All of that is gone, lost forever, but not forgotten.

The romantic spell that Charles Dickens cast on her — or was it the other way around — was a temptation too great, and its outcome too predictable in light of the social mores of 19th century England. Despite her mother’s best efforts to head off the incipient affair, love would have its way and damage would be done.

Screen Shot 2024-01-22 at 11.47.40 PM

Ralph Fiennes’s second directorial venture — following his adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” — is the closest thing to a Merchant Ivory production to come along since that venerable company closed shop. Although often mocked for their somber adaptations of Henry James and E.M. Forster novels, the 2005 death of Ismail Merchant has left a cinematic void that has yet to be filled.

Screen Shot 2024-01-22 at 11.49.10 PM

So it is not without consequence that Ralph Fiennes brings his keenly honed dramatic sensitivities to fleshing out a man whose legendary books (see “David Copperfield” and “A Christmas Carol”) continue to fire the imaginations of their readers more than a century and a half since they were written. Fiennes performs dual duties by inhabiting Dickens — he acts as well as directs — as a thriving middle-aged family man capitalizing on his local renown. He gives staged readings from his works in theaters packed with loyal fans. He revels in the flirtatious sway he holds over every member of the fairer sex that shamelessly greet him after each public performance. Still, his commitment to writing always comes first.

Screen Shot 2024-01-22 at 11.46.11 PM

Fiennes’s Dickens is a lusty creature bored with his matronly wife, and capable of going the necessary lengths to fulfill his desires for a young London actress whose wobbly abilities onstage hardly match her nubile charms and remarkable intellect. An enjoyable paradox lies in Felicity Jones’s period incarnation of a young proto-feminist struggling with societal constraints at odds with her own desires for the man whose books she reveres above all others. She has truly been “changed” by his books. Soon, she will be changed by the love she shares with their author.

Screen Shot 2024-01-22 at 11.50.32 PM

As much as Ralph Fiennes’s characteristically charismatic portrayal of Dickens anchors the film, it is Jones’s subtle but dynamic performance that resonates. Her half-whispered intonation and commanding poise seethes with a voraciousness of body and soul. The romantic vibrations that emanate from the film come directly from Jones, whose acting career seems at the precipice of a mainstream breakthrough.

Screen Shot 2024-01-22 at 11.44.32 PM

Fiennes based this film on Claire Tomalin’s 1991 book “The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens.” His close attention to every detail of atmosphere, costume, and manner supports the film’s thematic purpose examining the destructive power of forbidden passion between a celebrated author and the force of nature that fuels his ambition. The picture is more feminine than feminist in that it concentrates on the female consciousness. We come to understand the hardship that Dickens inflicts on his long-suffering wife Catherine (wonderfully played by Joanna Scanlan), as well as that of Nelly’s perceptive mother Frances (Kristin Scott Thomas). Moreover, we come to comprehend the balance of generational obligation that Nelly carries with her in a life fully lived.

Rated R. 111 mins.

4 Stars

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

December 03, 2012

HYDE PARK ON HUDSON

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.ColeSmithey.comThis ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

ColeSmithey.com

 



Limits of Respect
Massaging FDR Pays Modest Dividends

Screen Shot 2024-02-04 at 7.42.38 PMIf only we could see Bill Murray’s FDR hanging out with Daniel Day Lewis’s Lincoln, then there might be…well, another mediocre life-slice movie about dead presidents. Like Day Lewis, Murray builds his character from the ground up, making his mortal incarnation of a historical political figure thoroughly convincing.

Playing FDR’s romantically attracted sixth cousin Margaret “Daisy” Suckley, Laura Linney knows just how to harmonize with Murray’s performance, undercutting it when the scene demands.

Screen Shot 2024-02-04 at 7.32.51 PM

From an acting standpoint, “Hyde Park on Hudson” and “Lincoln” each provide textbook examples of incredibly polished dramatic work from some of the finest actors around. Still, if Steven Spielberg’s piece of revisionist history presents a brief essay, “Hyde Park on Hudson” is but a tastefully composed snapshot.

Screen Shot 2024-02-04 at 7.33.06 PM

Where “Hyde Park on Hudson” falls short is in the script department. Richard Nelson’s screenplay version of his own stage play doesn’t know where or how to expand to fit the cinema screen.

Screen Shot 2024-02-04 at 7.33.48 PM

The impetus for the story comes from Daisy’s letters and diaries retrieved after her death. Nelson doesn’t make much of a splash with his debut feature script. The under-inflated narrative is confined to a few days, when King George VI (Samuel West) and Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Williams) visit FDR at his upstate New York compound, which he shares with his domineering mother Sara Ann (Elizabeth Wilson) and emotionally remote wife Eleanor (Olivia Williams).

Colesmithey.com

Responsive movie audiences will remember King “Bertie” from Colin Firth’s characterization in Tom Hooper’s 2010 film “The King’s Speech.” However on-the-nose in might have been, it would have been a welcome touch had Firth reprised the role here since West’s portrayal of the stuttering George goes all but undetected.

Screen Shot 2024-02-04 at 7.33.33 PM

Roosevelt’s crippled legs hardly prevent him from playboy behavior with the likes of Daisy, whose parked-car handjob crystalizes the romantic nature of couple’s tenuous relationship. Sadly, one rub-out doesn’t provide enough of a hook to hang a movie on.

She was doing the old man a favor. Big deal.

Colesmithey.com

As with the miscalculated emotional emphasis of “Hitchcock,” the script places too many narrative eggs in a basket of repressed jealousy. Daisy is hardly able to act on her mild mistreatment by a powerful world leader with cavalier concern for her emotional well-being.

Screen Shot 2024-02-04 at 7.33.23 PM

Director Roger Michell (“Notting Hill”) knows how to handle milieu and atmosphere. Every composition of period perfection is a sumptuous delight to the eye. You’d never guess that you were looking at an English countryside as opposed to the film’s New York State setting. When FDR takes Daisy on a pastoral escape in his big convertible, mythology and romance connect.

Colesmithey.com

Some of the film’s humor borders on slapstick situational comedy that might work on the stage, but arrives at odds to the film’s remote tone. A running gag about British royalty eating hot dogs for lunch at Walden falls pancake-flat. “Hyde Park on Hudson” feels like two-thirds of a movie. There aren’t enough depths of subplot support to allow Bill Murray’s hemmed-in character to take hold. The movie is great to look at, but the story leaves you wanting so much more.

Rated R. 95 mins.

2 Stars

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

October 30, 2012

LINCOLN

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.ColeSmithey.comThis ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

ColeSmithey.com

 





 

ColeSmithey.comSteven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” is almost as much of a mess as the War Between the States.

Its truncated script — by playwright Tony Kushner, based loosely on admitted plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book “Team of Rivals” — sets out to cover Lincoln’s backroom manipulations to advance the Emancipation Proclamation through Congress as the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

ColeSmithey.com

Though the version I saw at a premiere at the New York Film Festival — with Steven Spielberg and high-profile cast members in attendance — was presented as “unfinished,” it seems unlikely that significant alterations will be made to the film. One could hope! Nothing less than a complete rewrite and re-filming could address the enormous filmic problems on display here.

ColeSmithey.com

Glorified cameo appearances by a cast of tens dare the audience to guess at the personal and political motivations of even the most developed supporting characters. Tommy Lee Jones’s portrayal of Republican House Leader Thaddeus Stevens is a case in point. Most embarrassing is the film’s fake-looking lighting design — a reference to the bleach bypass process Spielberg used on "Minority Report" — that glares from behind the window of every sound-stage set representing interior locations, such as those in the White House.

Sure, the Civil War was bad, but surely the sun still existed. Of course, as anyone even vaguely familiar with Daniel Day Lewis’s acting prowess could guess, the film finds firm footing in Day Lewis’s mesmerizing portrayal of Abraham Lincoln. If Daniel Day Lewis isn’t our greatest living film actor, I don’t know who is.

ColeSmithey.com

From the opening scene, in which a couple of Yankee soldiers recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address back to its author, Daniel Day Lewis inhabits every molecule of the president who infamously suspended habeas corpus and trashed the Constitution in order to wage an illegal war of economic conquest against the Confederacy.

Freeing the slaves? That wasn't Lincoln's objective. Anyone who has bothered to look beyond the elementary school propaganda version of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency knows that Lincoln never attempted to disguise his racist views toward “Negroes.”

ColeSmithey.com

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.”

ColeSmithey.com

The quote comes from Lincoln’s fourth debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858. But you'd never know from Spielberg's sanitized “Lincoln” that America’s 16th president espoused such public disdain for the “black race.” What the film does is illuminate the illicit lengths to which Lincoln went in order to ram the Emancipation Proclamation through a rump Congress — a strategy to break the South economically. No amount of intimidation or bribery was beneath Lincoln’s Republican cabinet of “rivals.”

ColeSmithey.com

“Lincoln” obviously fails as a history lesson. The movie also fails as a brief political epic. However, it does make its mark as a piece of political historical propaganda.

ColeSmithey.com

Less character study than a showcase for Daniel Day Lewis to inhabit an iconic character, “Lincoln” is nevertheless entertaining. Some ground could have been made up, had the filmmakers not stuck on an obligatory sequence about Lincoln’s assassination, since "Lincoln” is not a biopic but a look at one historical moment. Incorporating the superfluous nod to Lincoln’s untimely demise comes across as so much narrative fat.

See the film for Daniel Day Lewis. As for the “history lesson,” take it with a grain of salt. 

Rated PG-13. 132 mins.

2 Stars
Modern Cole

Cozy Cole

Cole Smithey on Patreon

Featured Video

SMART NEW MEDIA® Custom Videos

COLE SMITHEY’S MOVIE WEEK

COLE SMITHEY’S CLASSIC CINEMA

Throwback Thursday


Podcast Series