The greatest favor you can do for Sofia Coppola‘s “The Beguiled,” and yourself before you watch it, is to put all thoughts of Don Siegel‘s 1971 Clint Eastwood film of the same name from your mind. As a standalone film, Coppola’s version abounds in pleasures: from the starry cast (at least four of whom almost coincidentally seem to be hitting their career-best strides at exactly the same moment) to Philippe Le Sourd‘s cinematography, all misty woods, dangling creepers and softly sparkling candlelit interiors.
But as a comparison to Siegel’s more problematic, yet also more full-throated, luridly bonkers take on Thomas Cullinan’s novel, it feels strangely unkinked and scrubbed clean: stiff-backed and proper, with its hair tucked into neat braids and its crinolines smoothed down. Coppola can be breathtakingly modernist, and often complicates and challenges her own unparalleled instincts for filmmaking of ballerina elegance and classicism. But “The Beguiled” only ever lets its freak flag fly at half mast, and until the end where some very enjoyable archness is allowed to creep in, this Southern Gothic tale of female sexual jealousy feels surprisingly old school.
It is, of course, set in an old school — an academy for young ladies run by Miss Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) that, due to the Civil War raging not far off in the Virginia countryside, currently houses just five pupils, along with Martha herself and their teacher, Miss Edwina Morrow (Kirsten Dunst). Edwina is first shown teaching the girls French, and in a nice flourish that teases a more heightened tone than the film largely delivers, the blackboard instructions she uses to decline the verb “to be” have no space for the male pronoun: it runs je, tu, elle, nous, vous, elles.
The “elles” are the adventurous youngest, Amy (Oona Laurence), the musician Jane (Angourie Rice), the forward, sexually curious Alicia (Elle Fanning), the mischievous Marie (Addison Riecke) and the other one, Emily (Emma Howard). And the “il” who intrudes is Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell), a Dubliner who stepped off the boat from Ireland and took up an offer of $300 to take someone else’s place in the Union Army. In the film’s opening scene, Amy finds him, wounded and wild-eyed, while she’s out collecting mushrooms for dinner, and not knowing what to do with him, helps the rooster back to the henhouse.
Back there, Martha decides that the Christian thing to do is to heal his bad leg before letting one of the Confederate patrols cart him off to prison, an inevitability that keeps on getting put off as, one by one, the females of the household are drawn to McBurney. For his part, the Corporal puts his twinkling, hunky Irish charm to great use, wheedling his way into each of their affections by innately understanding the nature of each of their projected desires, and becoming that man with each of them. With Amy, he’s a pal. With Edwina he’s an ardent admirer and possible escape route. With Alicia he’s a potential deflowerer ready to induct her into the adult world just as she comes of age. And with Martha he’s a possible partner in her middle age, and lonely profession, suggesting a future whereby he will work the grounds of the school, be the man of the house and they will share brandy-fuelled companionship when the children have gone to bed.
These relationships, somewhat cursorily developed in this film, are much less complex and weird than in Siegel’s version: again, without wanting to dwell on the comparison too much, it does serve to remember that there, the soldier kisses the 12-year-old Amy on the mouth; he promises marriage to Edwina; he at one point threatens to take whichever of the girls he desires to bed and unmasks Martha’s previous incestuous relationship with a now-dead brother. Coppola’s restraint with this sort of detail suggests she’s anxious to avoid the story’s potboiler potential, but at times it feels more like faint-heartedness, and it robs the film of a little of its subtext and atmosphere — even the Southern patriot Civil War politics of the household are never investigated in any provocative way. Crucially, while Coppola’s “The Beguiled” retains its straightforwardly feminist plotline, the female desire depicted here is, with the exception of Edwina’s, disappointingly uncomplicated.
But enough about what isn’t here, because there’s plenty that is, in particular the vivid, invested performances. Kidman is terrific, particularly towards the film’s close when she gets a reaction shot at the head of a dinner table which would be worth the price of entry alone. And Farrell is extremely convincing in selling the corporal’s animal, survival-instinct manipulativeness, beneath beetling brows and soft brogue. But the MVP may well be Dunst, fleshing out Edwina’s sadness and making some sense of her climactic dramatic decision, which otherwise would be motivation lost to one of the screenplay’s slightly jarring ellipses (at just 95 minutes, it’s the rare title that could stand to be a bit longer).
And there are a lot of ways in which Coppola makes a virtue of her almost old-fashioned approach (there are no “Marie Antoinette” anachronisms: no pop soundtracking, no Converse in the closet, no anarchy in the smooth, rhythmic editing). The film has touches of a fairytale at times: there’s a little of Red Riding Hood’s encounter with the wolf in Amy with her basket of mushrooms walking through the forest. Alicia performs a kind of reverse Sleeping Beauty on the Corporal when she wakes him with a kiss. And Edwina’s status as the somewhat disregarded drudge who dreams of escape has elements, perhaps in her mind most of all, of Cinderella. But best of all is how “The Beguiled” looks and sounds: the overgrown gardens singing with crickets; the brooches and the stitches and the weave of the fabrics, from muslin to satin to sackcloth; the sweet voices singing Civil War love song “Lorena”; and a circle of femaleness, gathered in candlelight around a lone man, engulfing and almost obscuring him in a puffery of pastel pleats and petticoats. With imagery like this, you almost don’t miss the kink. [B]
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