MOVIE REVIEW : A ‘Country’ of Unspoken Passions

“A Month in the Country” (Beverly Center Cineplex)--adapted by playwright Simon Gray and director Pat O’Connor from J. L. Carr’s novel--has one of those stories where the action above is the tip of an iceberg.

This subtle, intelligent British period drama is set in the Yorkshire countryside in 1919, and it follows a pivotal month in the lives of two returning World War I soldiers--both of whom have been hired, in different capacities, to recapture the past. Tom Birkin (Colin Firth) is at work restoring a painted-over mural in the Oxgodby Church, and John Moon (Kenneth Branagh), an archeologist, is excavating artifacts in the field outside.

The land around them is green and placid, and the lives of the villagers seemingly uneventful and repressed. It’s one of those still, hot British summers, the kind that seems to come to us through the paintings of Constable and the novels of Jane Austen and George Eliot--with a melody by Delius wafting in over the trees.

Yet neither of these men has stumbled into paradise. One of them, Birkin, finds himself hard at work uncovering a corner of hell: a Bosch-like depiction of God casting sinners into the flames, while Moon ends up opening the grave of a stranger far from home.

Birkin and Moon are outsiders in an enclosed, inbred rural area, each man damaged by the war. Birkin has emerged with a strangling stammer, and Moon has a buried secret revealed suddenly near the end of the film. Birkin’s employer, the dry, mean Rev. Keach (Patrick Malahide) resents his presence, and Keach’s wife (Natasha Richardson) exalts it. She and Birkin fall, intensely and unspokenly, in love--a passion never consummated or expressed.

The inexpressible, in a way, is what the film is all about. There are buried meanings everywhere, and, like the mural, they can be uncovered only through painstaking care and sacrifice. Even then, the revelation may be opaque to many.

Birkin and Moon, like many 20th-Century literary protagonists, are strangers passing through; so is the artist who created the mural. So, it’s implied, are the unaware souls of the villagers. And they are the happier yet blinded beings who view art--the footprints of the souls who passed before them--with suspicion or benign indifference.

Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh played traitor Guy Bennett and his friend Tommy Judd in the stage play of “Another Country,” and Branagh later played Judd opposite Rupert Everett’s Guy in the film. They’re able to suggest the nervous intimacy, the homoerotic shadows that hover over the two. And they’re the centerpiece of a pristine cast. Malahide gives the Rev. Keach the darkly clenched petulance of a man trying to horde his spirit; Natasha Richardson, as Mrs. Keach, has the limpid purity of a bird leaping through drops of sunlight in a dark wood.

The movie is intelligent, complex, many-layered. Yet it’s also a bit stiff and enigmatic. To fully enjoy it, you may have to have a taste for understatement, for this special portrayal of tightly held passion, this evocation of the crawly tensions and black fears that exist, unexpressed, just beneath the surface. Director Pat O’Connor, made the darkly thrilling Irish film “Cal”--but his touch here may be a bit too straightforward.

O’Connor understands the characters and makes no false steps. But he doesn’t quite dig into the mysteries, evoke the fears beneath. “A Month in the Country” (MPAA rated: PG) may need the more baroque style of a director like Joseph Losey or Harold Pinter--who staged many of Gray’s plays.

The central image of the film and the mural is one figure: a helpless man with the moon cut into his forehead, and his scream of damnation as he plunges into the abyss. Losey, especially, might have brought out the Edvard Munch-like terror of this image and the world around it. O’Connor is cooler, more collected. Yet, in his way, he and the excellent cast suggest some of the terror and mystery of art and life, the gods that can lie buried beneath an overcoat of paint.

‘A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY’

An Orion Classics release of a Film Four International/PFH Limited presentation of a Euston Films production. Producer Kenith Trodd. Director Pat O’Connor. Script Simon Gray. Camera Ken MacMillan. Editor John Victor Smith. Music Howard Blake. With Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh, Natasha Richardson, Patrick Malahide, Tony Haygarth, Jim Carter.

Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG (parental guidance suggested; some material may not be suitable for children).