Film Review: Newest ‘Bovary’ takes conventional route
Ahhh! It seems like only yesterday that I reviewed an adaptation of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.” How our minds play tricks with the passage of time! Why, it was actually a whole three weeks ago that I wrote about Anne Fontaine’s meta-adaptation “Gemma Bovery.” Yet, here we are again, confronting a new version that aesthetically seems a lot older.
What’s up with that?
Fontaine took the book’s plot apart, shuffled things around, moved it to present day, and most importantly changed the tone from tragedy to farce. The newly arriving version — from director Sophie Barthes, whose one previous feature, “Cold Souls,” was spotty but intriguing — is utterly conventional, closer to Vincente Minnelli’s 1949 Hollywood rendition with Jennifer Jones or Claude Chabrol’s 1991 film with Isabelle Huppert. Barthes’ most daring moves are dropping the Bovary’s child and compressing something like 20 years to one year.
Mia Wasikowska takes the lead this time, and she conveys Emma Bovary’s dreamy manner perfectly. She’s played vaguely out-of-it types before, in “Alice in Wonderland,” “Stoker,” and “Maps to the Stars.” Her light hair, her pallor, her reediness, and her voice all make her a natural choice.
The film opens with Emma in a convent school, getting an education that in no way prepares her for the real world. She is married off to Charles Bovary (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), a country doctor of questionable competence. It seems ideal, but she quickly feels stifled by boredom. Charles heads off for work every day, then returns to eat dinner and go to bed. They are middle-class enough to have a maidservant, so there is really nothing for Emma to do.
Her only preparation for such a life is what she’s read in romantic novels. Charles — though an altogether decent guy — is disappointingly different from what she had fantasized, so she starts casting around for grand romance. She has two affairs, but they end up unsatisfying as well. The men might or might not qualify as cads, but neither is a villain. That would be the merchant Lheureux (Rhys Ifans), who eggs her on to buy high-priced items on credit.
Apparently the novels she read failed to deal with the concepts of money, trade and debt. She manages to spend far more than Charles can pay, destroying his modest but comfortable life.
Therein lies one of the film’s main problems. It may be that in the novel Flaubert reveals enough of her inner life to earn her at least a little sympathy. But on the screen she is, well, a ninny — narcissistic, self-absorbed, irresponsible. The only thing that keeps us engaged is that we hopefully wait for her death...which Barthes mercifully shows us in the opening scene.
Then there’s the aesthetic/technical problem of accents. In English language releases set in other lands, particularly in period films, the characters — by convention — speak with British accents, replacing the home country’s class inflections with English equivalents. With the exception of Wasikowska, Ezra Miller and Paul Giamatti, the players in “Madame Bovary” are British and cleave to the convention.
But the three Americans sound like three Americans. Wasikowska gets away with it, Giamatti less so, and Miller not at all. Miller’s been good in everything else I’ve seen him in, but here his pronunciation and flat tone are conspicuously out of place. In terms of period credibility, his performance ranks somewhere below Keanu Reeves’ awkward work in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dracula.”
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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).