Movie Review: Sofia Coppola stops playing nice and goes for the jugular with “The Beguiled”.
If asked to handpick a director to remake “The Beguiled” — a semi-schlocky/semi-brilliant Don Siegel-directed oddity from 1971 whose logline almost reads like softcore porn — I doubt Sofia Coppola would be anyone’s first choice. Mr. Siegel’s terse, masculine filmmaking style is worlds away from Coppola’s own, and there’s very little in the younger filmmaker’s oeuvre — the postmodern frippery of “Marie Antoinette,” the bittersweet lament of “Lost in Translation,” the intoxicating, slow-mo languor of “Somewhere” — to suggest she’d be the right director for the job.
And yet, Ms. Coppola, whether you respond to her talents or not, has proven time and time again that she is not to be underestimated. Whether it’s a devastating adaptation of a Jeffrey Eugenides book previously thought to be un-adaptable, or just a frothy Christmas variety special starring everyone’s favorite aging kook, Bill Murray, Coppola is a more esoteric director than her critics would have you believe. While it’s true that she often depicts lives shielded by privilege, unfolding in cloistered environments far removed from our own reality, the lyricism and visual poetry of Coppola’s style cannot be denied. While she once existed in the shadow of her father Francis, Sofia has now stepped out into the limelight on her own: daring us to judge her purely on the basis of her own storytelling abilities.
Who would have thought that Ms. Coppola — who gives off an almost impossibly mellow vibe in interviews — would have a great Southern Gothic potboiler in her? Coppola’s version of “The Beguiled” is an eerie and riveting period psychodrama that takes the more lurid and dated elements of Siegel’s original film and fashions something bewitching out of that earlier work’s fundamental ingredients. I knew Coppola could do stylish ennui and capture the sexual and spiritual yearning of women young and old. I was unaware, however, that she possessed such an effortless flair for bone-deep menace. “The Beguiled” is a deeply creepy movie — and also an immensely satisfying one, if you give yourself over to the story’s lunatic pleasures and are comfortable letting Ms. Coppola play the audience like a Stradivarius.
It’s hard to capture exactly what kind of tone “The Beguiled” is going for from watching the film’s trailers. Is it a sweat-soaked Southern romance: one filled with wild sex, damning betrayals and lovely lace dresses? Is it something darker, more sinister — something more indebted to the works of author Ira Levin and directors like Dario Argento and Roman Polanski? Or is the film a kind of winking gallows comedy that encourages its viewers to howl in disbelieving laughter as demure Southern hospitality dissolves into madness and mayhem?
To be honest, reader, “The Beguiled” is all of those things at once. It’s also, unsurprisingly, a pessimistic fairy tale that opens on an image — a young girl wandering through a fog-sheathed wilderness, picking mushrooms and placing them delicately in a straw basket — that seems ripped out of a Grimm Brothers tale. It’s difficult to call “The Beguiled” a straight-up thriller, though the last twenty minutes are fraught with chilling set pieces and there’s even some honest-to-goodness body horror in the final act. And while “The Beguiled” is difficult to classify, it also gets under your skin to such a degree that the superficial criticisms that have been leveled at the film even before its release start to seem strained. Coppola is venturing far outside her comfort zone here and, in the process, she’s displayed a whole new side of her skill set that I was previously unaware of.
Or, maybe Coppola isn’t venturing too far outside her preferred lane here. Like “The Virgin Suicides,” “The Beguiled” is about beautiful women trapped inside a self-sustaining ecosystem (a suburban house in that earlier film, a girl’s seminary in this new one), and largely cut off from the outside world. And like “The Virgin Suicides,” the presence of masculinity in this entirely feminine environment is regarded with equal parts lust, distrust and guarded curiosity.
What’s so entrancing about “The Beguiled” is how the director’s seventh film makes use of its intense cinematic formalism (the movie is one of the year’s most visually gorgeous feats, shot on 35mm by Phillipe Le Sourd, who also shot “The Grandmaster” for Wong-Kar Wai) to enhance the richness of the story. Coppola’s detractors have often accused her of favoring glitz over emotional truth, and in pretty, airless films like “Marie Antoinette” and “The Bling Ring,” it’s not hard to see why the criticism sticks. “The Beguiled,” however, is all the more terrifying because you come to care very much about the people in this story: as the noose tightens around their neck, you become weirdly attached to their fates. Even the film’s quote-unquote villain isn’t so much an avaricious animal as he is a flawed, impulsive fool who makes decisions with his dick when he should be thinking with his brain.
“The Beguiled” opens on an image of remarkable beauty. The 11-year old Amy (“Southpaw’s” Oona Laurence) walks through a verdant blush bedecked on all sides by looming Spanish moss. She is fetching mushrooms for that night’s dinner, humming a sweet ditty to herself. The year is 1863. Amy is a student at the nearby Farnsworth Seminary: an all-girl’s reform school overseen by the quietly fearsome Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman, who is having some kind of 2017).
Amy is startled to happen across a badly wounded Union Corporal, John McBurney (Colin Farrell, charming and sleazy in equal measure), whom she finds cowering behind a tree. With just the right degree of silver-tongued flattery, McBurney proceeds to convince the young girl to bring him back to the seminary, where Ms. Farnsworth tends to his wounds and slowly nurses him back to health. This isn’t to say that the ailing soldier receives anything approximating a warm welcome: Farnsworth never misses an opportunity to remind McBurney that he is “the enemy,” and that as soon as his bum leg has been mended, he’ll be out of their hair and out of their lives for good.
Ms. Farnsworth isn’t the only woman at the seminary who takes an interest in Corporal McBurney. Edwina, played by Kirsten Dunst in a performance that treads into waters of unimaginable sadness, looks at this handsome Irish man of action and sees a way out of her current life. Alicia (Elle Fanning) mostly sees a piece of meat, though the lustful teen isn’t above twisting the good soldier’s sympathies towards her own ends. Lest you think the younger girls are underdeveloped, they all have indelible personalities as well: Amy is trusting and naïve (she did bring McBurney back to the seminary, after all), Emily (Emma Howard) is quiet and obedient, Jane (Angourie Rice from “The Nice Guys”) is snotty and defiant, and Marie (Addison Riecke) gets all the movie’s best lines. They seem to regard McBurney with an outsized, almost primal fear: as if he’s a real-life monster who’s stepped out of one of the children’s books that Edwina reads them every night before bed and into their lives.
Of course, McBurney quickly reveals himself to be something of a salacious dog, though Farrell’s inherent likeability prevents him from entering the realm of venal nastiness occupied by the character in the original film (who was played by a young Clint Eastwood). Mostly, the Corporal can’t believe his luck: imagine having Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman and Kirsten Dunst all fawning over you and separately pining for your affection! It’s at this point which “The Beguiled” kicks into a higher gear, and what began as an understated, almost ghostly chamber piece then turns into the kind of hysterical, blood-splattered spectacle you’d typically see in a Brian De Palma movie. It’s the kind of film where Nicole Kidman authoritatively commands one of her girls to “bring her the anatomy book” right before a shiver-inducing cut to black. It’s such a near-perfect moment, you want to stand up and applaud.
Coppola has always had a way with actors, even in her lesser films, and this is true in “The Beguiled” as well. 2017 is shaping up to be the year of Nicole Kidman, between her career-best work on the HBO drama “Big Little Lies” and her upcoming reunion with Mr. Farrell in Yorgos Lanthimos’ black comedy “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”. Kidman imbues Ms. Farnsworth with her typical regal elegance, but there’s something about the character’s wicked smile that freezes the viewer’s blood. When Martha Farnsworth issues a command, people listen. Farrell is also typically excellent, lending some welcome notes of dark comedy and horndog charm to what could easily be too self-serious of a role (his delivery of the line “you’ve got nothing to worry about” after Elle Fanning shoots him a particularly leering glance prompted ecstatic laughter from the audience I saw this movie with). I was also particularly taken with Angourie Rice, who was one of the biggest bright spots in last year’s Shane Black-directed action-comedy “The Nice Guys”. Rice has an inherently sardonic nature and a deep intelligence that betrays her years, and I could see her easing into Scarlet Johannsson-type roles later in her career.
To my great surprise, my favorite performance in “The Beguiled” belonged to none other than Kirsten Dunst. I’ve been hot and cold on Dunst in the past: her immense charm as a performer often seemed, to me, to conceal a lack of range, a deficit of dynamism. After I saw her in season two of Noah Hawley’s “Fargo” on FX, I began to see something different in Dunst. As she had matured, her face had filled out, her youthful insouciance replaced with something a tad more melancholy. The young actress is entering a fascinating chapter in her career, and her work as Edwina in “The Beguiled” broke my heart into a million pieces. This is Dunst’s third collaboration with Coppola (fourth, if you count her wordless cameo in “The Bling Ring,” which I don’t), and the director clearly sees something in her apparent muse that others must be too impatient to notice. Dunst is more unguarded in “The Beguiled” than she has ever been onscreen, and while the odds aren’t exactly in her favor, I would hope that she gets at least some awards recognition for her work here when the end of the year rolls around.
Coppola made history earlier this year when she became the second female director in history to take home the coveted Best Director Award at Cannes. And yet, controversy has trailed “The Beguiled” well before its release here in the states. The original text, written by Thomas P. Cullinan, featured the integral part of an African-American house servant, who was played by blues singer and actress Mae Mercer in Siegel’s original film. That character has been completely excised from Coppola’s new work, and her absence justified by merely three lines of dialogue: “the slaves left”. There is also some strange irony in that the movie’s primary tableau — a gorgeously restored New Orleans plantation — was also one of the principal shooting locations for Beyoncé’s “Lemonade”. That song and the accompanying video were both incendiary war cries that took the African-American and female narratives back from the clutches of imperialist white America, and placed them back in the hands of those to whom they belonged.
This isn’t the first time Coppola has been accused of whitewashing. “Lost in Translation” drew criticism for its occasionally tone-deaf depiction of native Japan, while “The Bling Ring” even went so far as to omit a key Latin-American character from that movie’s central posse. And while I can see why people are upset with Coppola for her focus on white women of means, I also concede that the director’s very pragmatic reasoning for leaving the character out of the story in the case of “The Beguiled” is more of an acknowledgment of her own storytelling limitations than anything malicious or ignorant. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to see Coppola take on the issue of slavery in the South — it’s certainly not her wheelhouse, and it may not be her story to tell. In spite of its sumptuous Civil War trappings, “The Beguiled” is not a movie about race. Instead, it is a typically moody Sofia Coppola tone poem about desire and betrayal, one that just happens to be set in the Antebellum South, with its melodramatic mise-en-scene painted in gorgeously muted colors.
In case you’re just skipping to the bottom of this review to see what grade I gave this movie, let me just say: there’s a lot to love about “The Beguiled”. From the ominous booms of cannon fire that punctuate the slowly-building narrative like drums from a horror movie, to the pleasurably analog, synth-heavy score by French pop-rock band Phoenix (Coppola is married to their lead singer, Thomas Mars), “The Beguiled” is a feast for the eyes and ears that leaves you with plenty to chew on the next day. It’s a film about proclamations of love that go unsaid, and the lethal consequences of what happens when you find yourself at the mercy of powerful women. I’d love to see another continuation of the gorgeous minimalism that Coppola displayed in films like “Lost in Translation” in “Somewhere” but if “The Beguiled” is any indication that she wants to take an extended detour into pure suspense… then I say, bring it on. Grade: A-.
