MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Sommersby’ Survives on Star Power

“Sommersby” (citywide) is not quite the old-fashioned romantic classic it tries to be. But given its problems, what is surprising about this three-hanky film is how close it gets at times to providing the traditional satisfactions of the genre.

Cloned from classic 1940s weepies, “Sommersby” is more than anything else a film at war with itself, giving with one hand while taking away with the other. Yet even its partial success shows once again that a strong core story can hold its own against an indifferently written script, and that that magical commodity called star chemistry can compensate for acting that ranges all the way from radiant (Jodie Foster) to regrettable (almost everyone else).

Lushly photographed in the grand manner by Philippe Rousselot (“A River Runs Through It”), “Sommersby” is set in 1867 in a benighted Tennessee hamlet called Vine Hill, a quiet spot where nothing much seems to have happened since the Civil War ground to a halt.

All that changes the day Jack Sommersby (Richard Gere) strolls in. The town’s biggest landowner, he hasn’t been seen or heard from since he left for the war seven years before. Yet he has no trouble recognizing everyone and has a kind word for one and all, even the faithful old dog that doesn’t seem quite so happy to see him.

As surprised as the dog at the man’s return are Sommersby’s wife, Laurel (Foster), and her close personal friend Orin (Bill Pullman), an earnest Bible thumper who has been looking out for Laurel all these years with an obvious eye toward matrimony if Jack never made it back.

It turns out that Jack and Laurel did not exactly part on the best of terms. “That’s where you were sleeping before you left,” she tells him coolly, pointing to a bedroom across the hall from her own. The antebellum Jack was apparently a drinker and hell-raiser of major proportions, a lout his wife barely tolerated during their three troubled years of prewar marriage.

Not so the New Jack. Soberer, saner, infinitely more romantic than the man who rode off to battle, this returning paragon oozes both bedroom charm and community egalitarianism. He not only comes up with the idea of planting burley tobacco as a way to revive Vine Hill’s economy, he insists on sharing the potential bounty with the town’s newly freed slaves. Laurel starts to feel that this man is too good to be true, and soon others with darker motives are saying the same.

Moviegoers with moderately healthy memories will by this time have recognized “Sommersby” as a reworking of “The Return of Martin Guerre” of a decade back. That film was in turn based on one of the most durable of true stories, an incident involving a man who returned after a war in 1560 to reclaim his wife and property in the foothills of the French Pyrenees.

Powerful and compelling, the story of Guerre and his wife has at last count inspired a play, a musical, two novels, several works of nonfiction and even an operetta in addition to the Deparadieu film and this one, and it is beyond the powers of even Hollywood to absolutely ruin its essential psychological fascination.

Still, people have tried. “Sommersby’s” script, written by Nicholas Meyer and Sarah Kernochan from a story by Meyer and Anthony Shaffer, is filled with an inordinate amount of ripe Southern foolishness, everything from humble freemen to drunken racists and cross-burning night riders.

The language is similarly overblown and cliched and British director Jon Amiel (best known for Dennis Potter’s “The Singing Detective”) has almost systematically removed any trace of nuance or subtlety from the film’s subsidiary characters, including a brief cameo by James Earl Jones as a stern but honest judge.

Where the two leads are concerned, however, the situation is surprisingly quite different, though with Gere it is a near thing. A thoroughly contemporary actor (as Bruce Beresford’s “King David” more than proved), Gere is not at his best wearing period costumes and talking in a disconcerting Southern accent.

Still, he and Foster prove surprisingly persuasive as a couple who learn to love one another and they work up much more of a romantic charge than anyone could have anticipated. Their very 1940s scenes of discreet and intimate passion (the film is rated PG-13 for sensuality) are warm and convincing and when the two of them are alone together on the screen, “Sommersby” has no problem providing the kinds of satisfactions it sets out to.

Much of the credit for this must go to Foster. Already a two-time Oscar winner at the age of 30, she seems to reveal new aspects of her ability with every picture. “Sommersby” is her first adult costume drama and she is memorable in it, not only losing herself totally in the period but managing to project a combination of sweetness, fire and mature beauty that is impossible to resist. This is as completely thought-out a performance as you are likely to see, and if the rest of “Sommersby” were halfway as persuasive, there is no telling how good this on-again, off-again romance might have turned out to be.

‘Sommersby’

Richard Gere: Jack Sommersby

Jodie Foster: Laurel Sommersby

Bill Pullman: Orin

James Earl Jones: Judge Isaacs

Le Studio Canal+, Regency Enterprises, and Alcor Films present a Arnon Milchan production, released by Warner Bros. Director Jon Amiel. Producers Arnon Milchan, Steven Reuther. Executive producers Richard Gere, Maggie Wilde. Screenplay Nicholas Meyer and Sarah Kernochan. Story by Nicholas Meyer and Anthony Shaffer. Cinematographer Philippe Rousselot. Editor Peter Boyle. Costumes Marilyn Vance-Straker. Music Danny Elfman. Production design Bruno Rubeo. Art director Michael Johnston. Set decorator Michael Sierton. Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13 (sensuality).