Movie Review: Victoria & Abdul

Victoria & Abdul ** / *****

Directed by: Stephen Frears.

Written by: Lee Hall based on the book by Shrabani Basu.

Starring: Judi Dench (Queen Victoria), Ali Fazal (Abdul Karim), Tim Pigott-Smith (Sir Henry Ponsonby), Eddie Izzard (Bertie, Prince of Wales), Adeel Akhtar (Mohammed), Michael Gambon (Lord Salisbury), Paul Higgins (Dr. Reid), Olivia Williams (Lady Churchill).

 

Dame Judi Dench deserves better movies than she has been given in the last few years. True, there are not many actresses in their 80s, who can still say that they have movies built around them at all, so I suppose we should be thankful they decide to give her work at all. And yet, when I see her in films like Philomena (2013), it shows that she still has it – she can still carry a movie, and still stretch her acting wings a little bit. So when she gets plonked into a lazy art house film aimed at the senior crowd like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (or its sequel) – or sadly, Victoria & Abdul, it’s more than a little depressing. The film returns Dench to the role that got her the first of now 7 Oscar nominations 20 years ago. That film. Mrs. Brown, was about Queen Victoria strange relationship with her Scottish servant, John Brown (Billy Connelly). Victoria and Abdul finds Queen Victoria older – now without even John Brown to keep her company – who, you guessed it, develops another unorthodox relationship that raises the ire of those in British high society, and her family. This time though, it’s a young man from India named Abdul (Ali Fazal).

 

The film proceeds pretty much exactly how you think it will from the outset. When it begins, the Queen is old, depressed and essentially waiting for death. There is very little that brings her joy anymore, and she can barely find a reason to keep going. Abdul arrives for her Golden Jubilee – a clerk, there to present her something from India, and their friendship grows from there. Through him, she starts to see the world in a new light – and the British Empire’s role in India in a different light as well. Of course, this doesn’t sit well with anyone – who prefer the status quo. Everyone is basically waiting for her to die so that her son Bertie (Eddie Izzard) can take over – because they know he’s not going to rock the boat.

 

To be fair the film – and especially Dench – the great Dame is hardly phoning it in for the movie, which she almost certainly could do at this point. She is fun and funny in the film, and at times surprisingly touching. She basically runs laps around everyone else in the movie (who, sadly, do seem to be phoning it in). As the other title character, I don’t think Ali Fazal has much of a chance to keep up with Dench. His role is strangely written, as the film presents him as honest and straight forward – and does so even after one embarrassing “omitted” truth after another comes out about him. He remains a thinly drawn character that you never really get to know. There is a little more of a conman in him that the film would like to pretend there is. While racial and class bigotry certainly play the biggest role in those around the Queen hating him – it’s not the only reason.

 

The film was directed by Stephen Frears – a solid director, who has made some great films in the past (The Grifters, High Fidelity, The Queen, Dirty Pretty Things, My Beautiful Launderette, Price Up Your Ears, Dangerous Liaisons), who has mainly stuck to this kind of fuddy duddy prestige drama in recent years. He knows what he’s doing in them, and he does it well. But Victoria & Abdul is the type of film that you watch it, suspecting you’ve already seen it before. There is nothing to distinguish it, nothing to make it stand out, and nothing to make it memorable. It’s pleasant enough certainly, but doesn’t go anywhere. Dame Judi Dench deserves better,

Movie Review: Florence Foster Jenkins

Florence Foster Jenkins

Directed by: Stephen Frears.

Written by: Nicholas Martin. 

Starring: Meryl Streep (Florence Foster Jenkins), Hugh Grant (St Clair Bayfield), Simon Helberg (Cosmé McMoon), Rebecca Ferguson (Kathleen), Nina Arianda (Agnes Stark), Stanley Townsend (Phineas Stark), Allan Corduner (John Totten), Christian McKay (Earl Wilson).

 

Watching Florence Foster Jenkins, I felt nothing but respect for the performances by Meryl Streep, Hugh Grand and Simon Helberg – who make this film watchable from beginning to end, and even occasionally enjoyable. But I could never really get into the film itself – mainly I think it’s because I could never muster sympathy – or empathy – with a rich woman, who is among the worst singers in the world, who is such a precious flower that everyone around her pretends she is a masterful singer. She is a character without any self-awareness in this regard, and I found her more annoying than anything. No, I didn’t sneer at her – like some of the assholes in the audience in the film, or the reporter played by Christian McKay, does in print. But I couldn’t muster any real feeling for a woman who has so much money everyone spends the movie kissing her ass – no matter how the film bends over backwards to forge real connections between its three leads. The fact that it pulls that off at all is a miracle.

 

The film takes place in New York in the 1940s. Florence Foster Jenkins (Streep) is a rich heiress – given tons of money by her father when he died, and has no heirs to pass it along to. She is married to St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant) – an average actor and monologist, who knows how average he is, and has decided to just have fun in his life. At first, we think Bayfield is just another Hugh Grant asshole – using Florence for her money, especially since he has his own apartment, and a younger mistress (Rebecca Ferguson). But the film makes it clear that there really is a bond between him and Florence – that he doesn’t just cater to her to keep getting her money, but out of genuine affection for her. Yes, an asshole would run interference for Florence with the press – but Bayfield goes further than that, defending her to people she would never know were mocking her. That affection doesn’t extend to sex – I don’t think – but the movie explains that in its way as well. Grant, who has often cruised on his considerable charm in movies, here digs deeper – and makes Bayfield the film’s most interesting, complex character. The film also acts as a coming out party of sorts for The Big Bang Theory’s Simon Helberg – who plays Cosme McMoon – the piano playing accompanist hired by Bayfield to work with Florence. He knows she’s awful – but needs the money. Like Bayfield, he will eventually grow fond of Florence himself – risking ridicule to perform with her.

 

Then there is Streep, who is of course, Meryl Streep – so you know her performance is good. Her biggest accomplishment here is to sing as horribly as she does, because we know how good she can sing. It’s ridiculous and over-the-top and hilarious, because that is precisely what it’s supposed to be. Streep plays Florence as completely clueless as to her own lack of abilities- tremendously needy and vain as well. She is able to get away with what she does because she gives so much money to the right people – she really does support music at a time when it needed it, which is why so many people line up to kiss her ass.

 

What I wish about Florence Foster Jenkins is that the filmmakers – director Stephen Frears and writer Nicholas Martin – had risked showing Florence in something other than a completely sympathetic light. I’m not asking the film to mock her – mockery in easy in movies, and more often than not comes across to me as smug superiority. Yet the movie seems so utterly and completely charmed by her that it left me feeling uneasy. Should we really have that much sympathy for a woman who lived a life of incredible leisure, and was surrounded by people – however much affection they genuinely had for her – never would have been there had she not had money? Isn’t there something more than a little sad (and not in the maudlin, sentimental way the film portrays it in the last act) about this story?

 

Make no mistake, Florence Foster Jenkins knows its target audience, and delivers to them precisely what they want. But as with many Streep films in years, I am left admiring her work way more than the film itself. At least this time, unlike many in the past, she doesn’t so completely take over the film that there is no room for anyone else to shin – Grant and Helberg are both better than Streep are really. But it’s another one of those Streep films where you left saying “She’s amazing – the film, not so much”.

Movie Review: The Program

The Program

Directed by: Stephen Frears.   

Written by: John Hodge based on the book by David Walsh.

Starring: Ben Foster (Lance Armstrong), Chris O'Dowd (David Walsh), Guillaume Canet (Medecin Michele Ferrari), Jesse Plemons (Floyd Landis), Lee Pace (Bill Stapleton), Denis Ménochet (Johan Bruyneel), Edward Hogg (Frankie Andreu), Dustin Hoffman (Bob Hamman), Elaine Cassidy (Betsy Andreu), Laura Donnelly (Emma O'Reilly).

  

In order to be the best in the world at something, you have to go after it with single minded determination. Whatever else you can say about Lance Armstrong – and you can say plenty – you cannot deny that he went after being the best cyclist in the world with that determination. Did he cheat? Of course he did. But everything we now know suggests that pretty much everyone who was among the best in the world at that time was cheating – Armstrong just cheated better than anyone else did. The best thing about The Program, which charts Armstrong’s career from okay rider to cancer survivor to beloved seven time champ to disgraced athlete, is that Ben Foster’s performance as Armstrong captures that one track mind he had. He knows everyone is cheating, so damn it, he’s going to do it as well – and he’s going to win.

 

Foster has played a variety of psychos over the years, and he plays Armstrong in very much the same way. There is a cold look in his eyes as he rants and raves about how he has never tested positive, and when he goes after one person after another who tries to go public with what they know. It isn’t enough for Armstrong that there isn’t evidence – for years – which he cheated. He has to destroy those who are coming after him. And destroy them he does. It is the behind the scenes stuff where Foster really shines in the movie – the private moments we didn’t see. He is perhaps too good at doing that, as it bleeds over into the public face Foster gives Armstrong as well. Armstrong was a good actor – likable and charming enough to not only fool everyone, but to make people want to believe him. Foster doesn’t get that part right – he looks like a psycho even in those scenes as well. Foster is committed to this role – so committed, that apparently he actually used the drugs Armstrong did while filming the movie (which brings to mind Laurence Olivier’s advice to his Marathon Man co-star, Dustin Hoffman – also in this movie – “My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?”). There is commitment and there is stupidity – and Foster is dangerously close to the later here.

 

Aside from Foster’s performance though, there isn’t much in The Program. The film was directed by talented journeyman Stephen Frears – who rises and falls with his material. For every great film like The Grifters or High Fidelity, there are mediocrities like Mrs. Henderson Presents or Hero. Here, he’s saddled with a story that has been told many times over, including in Alex Gibney’s good documentary The Armstrong Lie just a couple of years ago. Frears and company don’t really bring much more to the table here. The audience surrogate is probably David Walsh (Chris O’Dowd), one of the reporters who never believed Armstrong, and was after him for years. But Walsh disappears for long stretches of the movie, and there isn’t much to his character. Nor is there very much to Guillaume Canet’s performance as Medecin Michele Ferrari, the doctor who acted as Armstrong’s doping mentor – it’s a broad performance, by a Frenchman, doing a broad Italian accent, in English, and doesn’t much work. Dustin Hoffman and Lee Pace are pretty much wasted. I did like Jesse Plemons work as Floyd Landis, Armstrong’s teammate, and eventual disgraced Tour de France champion himself. Plemons makes Landis jealous and rather pathetic – not the face Landis tries to put to the public, but rather a man jealous that he cannot do anything as good as Armstrong – even cheat.

 

The movie pretty much rushes through Armstrong’s career – all those Tour de France wins, his retirement, his comeback, and doesn’t offer much in the way of detail on anything – it’s too concerned with moving onto the next thing, before it really deals with anything. A tighter film – maybe one that focused purely on Armstrong trying to cover things up, and how he was actually caught (it grazes over that quickly), would have worked better. As it stands, The Program feels too workmanlike at every level. There is a great movie to be made here –and Foster may well have been able to deliver that great performance – but unfortunately, The Program isn’t it.

Movie Review: Philomena

Philomena
Directed by:  Stephen Frears.
Written by: Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope based on the book by Martin Sixsmith.
Starring: Judi Dench (Philomena), Steve Coogan (Martin Sixsmith), Sophie Kennedy Clark (Young Philomena), Mare Winningham (Mary), Barbara Jefford (Sister Hildegarde), Ruth McCabe (Mother Barbara), Peter Hermann (Pete Olsson), Sean Mahon (Michael), Anna Maxwell Martin (Jane), Michelle Fairley (Sally Mitchell), Charlie Murphy (Kathleen), Cathy Belton (Sister Claire), Simone Lahbib (Kate Sixsmith), Sara Stewart (Marcia Weller).

It would be easy to dismiss Philomena as simple, middlebrow fare made for old people and Oscar voters. There really is no denying that Philomena is “middlebrow” – safe entertainment with clearly drawn lines between good and bad that will make the audience laugh and cry at various points, and have them leave the theater feeling good. All of that is true. But is also doesn’t suggest what this movie does well. Directed by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, and featuring two excellent performances – by Coogan himself and Judi Dench – Philomena may not be an overly challenging film, the pleasures it offers may be small, but it is precisely the movie it wants to be – and somehow pulls off the trick of being sentimental, but not overly sentimental. In my recent review of The Book Thief, I complained that the film tries so hard to get the audience to cry, that I simply resisted it. The reason why Philomena works as well as it does is because it doesn’t seem like it’s trying at all.

The film is about Philomena Lee (Dench), an Irish lass who in the 1950s does the worse thing an young Catholic teenage girl can do – have sex. She gets pregnant – of course – and her family is so ashamed they send to live with the nuns. In exchange for taking her and her child in, all Philomena has to do is sign away her parental rights, so the nuns can sell her child, and then work for four years essentially do slave labor in the laundry. They let her see her son for one hour every day – until, of course, someone shows up with some cash, then he’s whisked away with no one bothering to tell Philomena beforehand. The bulk of the film takes place 50 years later – in 2003 – with Philomena still haunted by her “decision” to give Anthony up for adoption. Finally, she tells her daughter about her lost long son. Into their lives comes Martin Sixsmith (Coogan), a former journalist, and now a disgraced former government spokesperson, who has no idea what to do next. He doesn’t do “human interest” stories – but hell, it’s better than doing nothing so he agrees to help Philomena track down her long lost son – thinking he’ll get a good story out of it.

Frears is a journeyman director, who career still has a remarkably high consistency level – at least until the last few years, when he makes stinkers like Cheri (2009) and Tamara Drewe (2010). While I always like when he goes darker – in films like The Hit (1984), Prick Up Your Ears (1987) or Dirty Pretty Things (2003) – he is also at home with prestige fare like this – having made Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005) and The Queen (2006). Here he keeps the direction light, and the pace moving – knowing full well that the stars of the show are Dench and Coogan, and their unexpected chemistry together. For the most part, Frears simply stays out of their way.

The performances by the pair really are good. Coogan is a fine comedic actor – but he excels most at playing himself – literally in films like Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes or the pair of Michael Winterbottom films Tristam Shandy and The Trip. In Philomena, he goes a little bit dramatic – but still retains his comedic side – some of his best moments are his deadpan comic asides (my favorite “ Oh look – it’s a series”). He does get to flex his dramatic muscles a few times – and he’s surprisingly effective when he does. Then there’s Dench’s performance – which is really what makes the film worthwhile. Dench is the kind of actress who has sometimes been nominated for Oscars simply for showing up – I thinking her nominations for Chocolat, Iris and the aforementioned Mrs. Henderson Presents. Yet there is a tendency for some to write off all her work in the same way – and that’s simply not fair, as she was excellent in her other nominated work – Mrs. Brown, Shakespeare in Love and especially Notes on a Scandal – not to mention a host of other films, like last year’s Skyfall, where her small performance elevated the entire movie to arguably the best Bond film ever made. It would be easy for her to go broad in Philomena – to make her into a caricature, but Dench doesn’t do that. Her Irish accent is spot on, but subtle – showing Americans that you don’t need to make yourself sound like the Lucky Charms leprechaun to play Irish. And Dench also makes the daring choice to underplay her characters biggest dramatic moments, which makes them all the more impactful. Her Philomena is a woman who has all the reasons in the world to be angry at the Catholic Church, yet she maintains her faith in God, and refuses to give herself over to that anger. It is some of the best screen work Dench has ever done.

Philomena is a safe movie – it won’t challenge you very much, and doesn’t really try to make things overly complex and messy. It is the very definition of middlebrow entertainment. But it’s well done middlebrow entertainment, and contains a wonderful performance by Judi Dench at its center. It may not be my idea of a great movie – but I know a lot of people who would disagree with me. I think I’ll recommend it to my mother.

The Best Movies I Have Never Seen Before: The Hit (1984)

The Hit (1984)
Directed by: Stephen Frears.
Written by: Peter Prince.
Starring: John Hurt (Braddock), Terence Stamp (Willie Parker), Tim Roth (Myron), Laura del Sol (Maggie), Fernando Rey (Senior Policeman), Lennie Peters (Mr. Corrigan), Bernie Searle (Hopwood), Brian Royal (Fellows), Albie Woodington (Riordan), Jim Broadbent (Barrister).

The Hit is a strangely philosophical British gangster film. I wasn’t quite prepared for the film when it started, thinking it was going to a hardboiled thriller akin to something like The Long Good Friday (1980) or Mona Lisa (1986). Instead, I got a strange film – darkly comic, slow moving, ponderous, at times pretentious, and at times quietly profound. I’m not sure the movie is entirely successful – but it certainly is different.

The movie opens with Willie Parker (Terence Stamp) standing up in court and ratting out all his gangster friends. As he steps off the stand, the defendants he has just sold out stand up and start singing “We’ll meet again”, as the boss, Corrigan (Lennie Peters) looks on. This is, as far as I can recall, the only time Corrigan is on screen in the entire movie, but Peters strange, scarred face hangs over the rest of it. You need someone that looks this mean and hard for the film to work as it does.

Flash forward 10 years, and Willie is living a quiet life in Spain – until he is kidnapped by local youth toughs, and handed over to Braddock (John Hurt) and his rookie partner Myron (Tim Roth). They work for Corrigan, now out of prison, and waiting for them in Paris. Everyone knows what will happen when they get there – Willie will be killed. And along the way, they run into some trouble with another gangster, and kill him, but Braddock cannot bring himself to kill his hooker girlfriend Maggie (Laura Del Sol), so she gets dragged along with them on their strange journey through Spain, on route to Willie’s death – and probably Maggie’s as well.

Terence Stamp has always been an interesting actor, and here he has a strange, difficult role, that he pulls off. If you have a vision of what a gangster who rats out his friends would look like, then Stamp fits the bill perfectly – he has often played bad guys in the past. But his Willie is different. In the 10 years since he sold his friends out, he has spent a lot of time thinking and reading – and he seems ready to accept death. He has the chance to escape and he doesn’t, knowing that it wouldn’t really do him any good. He has been waiting for this, and seems to accept his fate. Yet, Willie isn’t as completely Zen in his reasoning as he appears to be, and herein lies the complexity for him. He admits he only sold out his friends because he couldn’t face jail time, and when his moment to truly accept death comes, he doesn’t handle it well. He is never quite what we think he is.

Tim Roth, in his first major role, is also excellent as the naïve, first timer Myron. He breaks the first rule of being a hitman, in that he actually starts to like Willie – even asking him why there are so many castles in the country, and joking with him. Roth, who can be as scary as any actor alive, makes his Myron into an innocent, likable idiot.

But for me, what keeps The Hit from being a great movie is that the other two people on this journey never really snap into focus. Laura Del Sol is just kind of there – along for the ride. She obviously wants to survive, and she tries to talk her way out of her death, but she doesn’t really add much. And John Hurt, who is given very little to say, never becomes the complex character he should be. He’s fine in the role, but there isn’t enough there. And I was also disappointed that they cast the great Fernando Rey as a Spanish cop, and then didn’t give him anything to do.

Directed by Stephen Frears (who has gone onto have a great career, that largely started here), he finds the right tone for the Peter Prince’s screenplay. This isn’t a hardboiled gangster film, but something else entirely. And while I don’t think it’s a great film, it’s one that held my interest throughout, and was surprisingly insightful. I liked The Hit – but everyone involved has done better.

Movie Review: Tamara Drewe

Tamara Drewe * ½
Directed by: Stephen Frears.
Written By: Moira Buffini based on the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds.
Starring: Gemma Arterton (Tamara Drewe), Roger Allam (Nicholas Hardiment), Bill Camp (Glen McCreavy), Dominic Cooper (Ben Sergeant), Luke Evans (Andy Cobb), Tamsin Greig (Beth Hardiment), Jessica Barden (Jody Long), Charlotte Christie (Casey Shaw).

Call it critical bias if you want to, but I have to say I’m pretty damn sick and tired of movie where shallow, superficial, rich snobs prance about the English countryside having various affairs, while trying to be convinced by the filmmakers that it’s all in good fun. Stephen Frears is a wonderful director, but Tamara Drewe is the latest in this string of movies – and its incessant “cleverness” combined with the utter vapidity of all of its characters completely turned me off from the first scene onwards. There really is no one in this movie that I would want to have a cup of coffee with, let alone spend two hours watching.

Well, that’s not exactly true. Gemma Arterton’s title character Tamara Drewe is such a peak physical specimen of female beauty, that you may in fact want to watch her. She is utterly gorgeous – not rail thin like most actresses these days, there’s the slightest jiggle about her, and watching her walk in those skin tight, cutoff jean shorts in the movie (which is the heart of the ad campaign of course) is somewhat mesmerizing. Call me shallow and superficial myself if you want to, but in a movie filled with such loathsome characters – including Drewe herself – watching Arterton move and pose was the only real pleasure I derived from the film.

Despite her performances in Clash of the Titans and Prince of Persia earlier this year, Arterton is not a bad actress either – as she proved earlier with The Disappearance of Alice Creed, where she did a remarkable job of maintaining her realistic character even as the movie spun out of control with plot twists. In Tamara Drewe, she really did convince me that her character was as shallow and stupid as she appears to be. So I guess that’s something. And I could say the same thing for the rest of the cast – Roger Allam is a complete asshole in the movie, and he plays it well. Dominic Cooper is a big headed rock star, and he captures that pretty perfectly as well. Luke Evans is not a bad physical specimen himself, and he seems like a lovable lunkhead. These are the three men that Drewe will take as her lovers in this movie – and the people who surround them make up the rest of the cast. Allam runs a writers retreat with his wife (Tamsin Greig, who is perhaps the only sympathetic character in the movie), which happens to be right next door to Drewe’s place – which she hires Evans to fix up. Meanwhile, two teenage girls, who spend all their time obsessing about celebrities (because there is nothing else to do in their small town), find out that Drewe has hooked up with rock star Cooper – and want to meet him. Jessica Barden is particular delights in calling Drewe Plastic (because of her admitted nose job), and fantasizing about Cooper, and finding ways to torment everyone involved.

It’s just I found it impossible to care about any of these characters – they all act purely on their most basest of instincts, with no rhyme or reason to do what they do, and completely oblivious to the consequences for their actions. Yet, for whatever reason, the film decides that Allam is worse than the rest (and I guess he is, but with these people, it’s only by a matter of degrees) and hence the only one deserving of any sort of comeuppance – and a rather grisly one at that, that I supposed I was meant to find funny (I didn’t). Meanwhile, the rest of the characters are paired up and meant to live happily ever after with each other. I suppose if there is a blessing in this, it’s that these miserable characters at least deserve each other – and can spare the rest of humanity their presence.

Perhaps I am being too hard on the film. It does appear that this is precisely the film the makers had envisioned when they set about to make it. But it’s all just so empty and shallow, the characters just so loathsome – and even worse boring – that I just could never care what happened to any of them. If they all had been in that field alongside Allam, I wouldn’t have complained in the least.

Movie Review: Cheri

Cheri **
Directed By: Stephen Frears.
Written By: Christopher Hampton based on the novels by Colette.

Starring: Michelle Pfeiffer (Lea de Lonval), Kathy Bates (Madame Peloux), Rupert Friend (Cheri), Felicity Jones (Edmee), Frances Tomelty (Rose), Anita Pallenberg (La Copine), Harriet Walter (La Loupiote), Iben Hjejle (Marie Laure).

Stephen Frear’s Cheri should be an enjoyable little romp of a film, but instead it’s a rather depressing experience. It is a film in which Michelle Pfeiffer plays Lea de Lonval, an aging courtesan in 1800s France, who takes on a much younger lover, who she dubs Cheri (Rupert Friend), and against her better judgment actually falls in love with him. When, after six years, Cheri’s mother (Kathy Bates), a retired colleague of Lea’s, and one of her best friends, decides that Cheri has had enough time fooling around, she arranges a marriage for him, devastating both Lea and Cheri.

The film is one of those costume dramas/comedies, in which people sit around in opulent splendor, trading barbed remarks under the guise of friendliness, but is really meant to cut to the bone. I’m not sure anyone in this film actually likes any of the other characters – except for Lea and Cheri of course – but they continue to get together out of force of habit, and because it seems like no one else is willing to spend time with them. Every conversation is calculated to inflict the most amount of damage on the other person, all the while the characters claim to only to be thinking of each other’s well being.

The film has a number of problems with it, that prevented me from enjoying it all that much. For one thing, the scenes in the film do not seem to play out naturally. Some are over just when they seem to be warming up, and others drag on well past the point of relevance. For a film that is short – just under 90 minutes – you would think that they could at least fill the scenes out properly. But the even more serious problem in the film is that we never really feel any connection between Lea and Cheri. They are characters who are constantly required to play a role in public, yet even in their private scenes they seem to be doing the same thing. You never feel the sexual attraction between the two of them, or even the more tender feelings of love. Cheri is such a little prick, you can’t help but wonder why any woman would love him at all – especially someone with Lea’s experience. The rest of the cast is given not much to do at all. At least Kathy Bates seems to be having fun playing a bitch as Cheri’s mother, but poor, beautiful Felicity Jones as Edme, the girl who gets stuck with Cheri as a husband, is given nothing to do at all.

Watching the film, I was reminded of two other, much better films. The first was Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, which is broad strokes seems similar to Cheri. A man (Daniel Day Lewis) is stuck marrying the prime and proper girl (Winona Ryder), when he really wants the more exciting woman (Pfeiffer). That movie proved that Pfeiffer can play this type of role to perfection – a role where feelings must remain buried under the surface, and yet Pfieffer’s performance was so delicate and perfect in that film, you always knew how she felt. The same was true of Daniel Day Lewis and Winona Ryder. The other film was last year’s The Last Mistress by Catherine Breilliant, where a young man marries the proper girl again, but cannot give up his lover, the sexually exciting Asia Argento. That was a film where the sexual chemistry between the leads felt real – where you could tell why he could not give up his mistress – she had a sexual pull over him he could not control. But the relationship in Cheri between Pfeiffer and Friend feels almost chaste. You do not understand why these two cannot give each other up.

It must be said that the movie is not really as terrible as I have made it sound, it’s just that it isn’t really good either. I liked Pfieffer, even if I didn’t quite believe her in the role, but I think that’s more the fault of Christopher Hampton’s screenplay then hers. The costume and the sets are also delightful, but you know you’re in trouble when you spend part of a review talking about them in the first place, and not the story. One final flaw I feel I need to bring up though is the ending. Why after a movie where little of consequence actually happened, did we need a voiceover telling us the most dramatic aspects of the story? I think it’s because what is described in that voiceover would have required actual human emotions to be played out on screen – something this movie never really does.