Despite Flaws, ‘Sea’ Has Emotional Sweep

Looking for a movie that’s deep-dish romantic and old-fashioned, where passionate love shares billing with the power of the mighty ocean? No, it’s not “Titanic” but “Swept From the Sea,” a traditional emotional melodrama that benefits from fine acting by Ian McKellen as well as its literary origins.

Though Joseph Conrad’s “Amy Foster,” the short story the film is loosely based on, is not one of the writer’s celebrated works, seeing “Swept From the Sea” underlines why classic fiction is such a hot commodity in Hollywood these days. Writers like Conrad believed in psychology and plot and were good at it, and even this trifling story from a master has the power and means to involve us.

British director Beeban Kidron has always cared about romance, but her films, at least those that have been seen in this country, have been different enough to give even confirmed auteurists pause. Taken together, the bracingly funny “Antonia and Jane,” the eccentric “Used People” and the near-fiasco “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar” leave you with no idea of how Kidron would do with this kind of costume drama.

Helped by the vivid pictorial sense of cinematographer Dick Pope (responsible for Mike Leigh’s most recent films), Kidron has done better than expected. Though it has some blemishes, “Swept From the Sea” is always involving, the kind of narrative-oriented, character-based yarn about the power of love that never goes out of fashion.

Newcomer Rachel Weisz, who debuted in “Stealing Beauty” and is soon to be seen in “Land Girls,” brings mystery and an essential calmness and self-possession to the complicated role of Amy Foster. To the other residents of her seaside village in 19th century Cornwall, Amy is distant and strange, but we see her as a kind of nature girl, a pagan sprite enraptured by the sea as the bringer of gifts most rare and wonderful.

Yanko Gooral (Vincent Perez) turns out to be the most unusual of those gifts. A Ukrainian highlander who left home for America, he is deposited by fate at Amy’s door. When they meet, each has reason to consider the other an apparition, and there is a kind of rare and unexpected eroticism in the gentle scene of her washing his wounds and offering him food.

The story, as far as he knows it, is begun by Dr. James Kennedy (McKellen). The doctor is introduced displaying complete coldness toward Amy, prompting one of his patients, the wealthy Miss Swaffer (an expert Kathy Bates), to ask, “Why do you hate her so much?” His tale is told reluctantly and by way of explanation.

As the most educated man in the area and the only one who’s traveled outside England, it is Dr. Kennedy who guesses that Yanko is not the guttural idiot the villagers take him for but an intelligent man speaking a foreign language. The two men bond through a mutual love of chess, and though Yanko gradually learns English, he cannot change the suspicion the town feels toward him.

Given that Amy is burdened with a similar outsider status, it is inevitable that their need to connect with another human being will lead her and Yanko to each other. One of the film’s dramas involves the terrible stresses the xenophobia and small-mindedness of their nominal friends and neighbors place on these two.

As a woman of surprising clarity and absolute faith in her own instincts, Amy is much the stronger of the pair, and Weisz’s fey performance also overshadows that of Perez, whose status as one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People in the World” only partly cancels out an awkward fake-Slavic accent.

Other performers also sound false notes, but the commanding figure of McKellen, one of the giants of British theater, outweighs them all. A splendid actor, McKellen does an almost magical job with the doctor, playing him with all manner of nuance and caring, turning the character into a complex figure whose thoughts and actions always fascinate.

With its operatic plot line and its throwback insistence that story and character matter, “Swept From the Sea” is the kind of film you have to choose to give yourself over to. “Fate is both inscrutable and without mercy,” one character says, and sentiments like that are hard to resist.

* MPAA rating: PG-13, for elements of theme and some sensuality. Times guidelines: genteel lovemaking and some threatening behavior.

‘Swept From the Sea’

Rachel Weisz: Amy Foster

Vincent Perez: Yanko

Ian McKellen: Dr. James Kennedy

Kathy Bates: Miss Swaffer

Joss Ackland: Mr. Swaffer

Phoenix Pictures presents, with the participation of the Greenlight Fund, a Tapson Steel Films production, released by Phoenix Pictures. Director Beeban Kidron. Producers Polly Tapson, Charles Steel, Beeban Kidron. Executive producers Garth Thomas, Tim Willocks. Screenplay Tim Willocks. Cinematographer Dick Pope. Editors Alex Mackie, Andrew Mondshein. Costumes Caroline Harris. Music John Barry. Production design Simon Holland. Art director Gordon Toms. Set decorator Neesh Ruben. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

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* In limited release.