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| Daphne Du Maurier |
I’d only just read Daphne Du Maurier’s book and really liked
it so I looked forward to seeing the movie.
This film has the distinction of not only being the worst
adaptation of a novel that I’ve ever seen [for how to make a successful
adaptation, see ITV’s Vanity Fair,
which was near perfect] but is also one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. To
put this in perspective, I’m talking The
Killing of a Sacred Deer bad (oh, Nicole! oh, Colin!), I’m talking Wonder Wheel bad (oh, Kate!). It’s as if
the director Roger Michel took his script from an abridged edition or perhaps
the Cliffs Notes of the novel, and even then one with several random pages torn
out, so that the gist and thrust of the narrative are lost.
Because of this, the film version lacks the heart, the logic,
the mystery and therefore the believability of the original story.
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| The Illustrated Mum |
Everything Michel adds grates and jangles with inauthenticity, for
instance he has someone who is evidently a lady, played with verve by the
always excellent Holliday Grainger (I first saw her in the amazing The Illustrated Mum),* talk about dog ‘shit’ when a woman in her
position just wouldn’t have. Then we have a servant say of another: ‘You fucking prickwit’. It’s completely unnecessary.
What’s annoying about this is that Du Maurier’s book is full
of dialogue and description. In the film, everything is exaggerated and/or conflated
till it makes no sense. In the book, Ambrose’s letters disclose the course of
his connection with Rachel, with several mentions of the laburnum tree in the
courtyard of Rachel’s villa in Italy, under which Ambrose would sit while
suffering from some recurring unnamed malady and there are many scenes that
show the development of the relationship between Rachel and Philip so that it
seems natural.
Everything Michel chooses to omit is vital to any
understanding of the story or empathy with the characters, for instance the
book conveys the life of Ambrose and Philip as a male idyll, with no real need
of a woman’s input, happy and carefree. But Michel barely acknowledges
this, having the same actor play both roles, allowing the impression that there was something wrong with their bachelor
life before she arrived.
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| Rachel Weisz |
I’m sure Rachel Weisz, who plays the eponymous Rachel can act (she usually can) but she fails
to make her Rachel either bewitching or sinister but merely seems a little unhinged,
one minute shouting (which doesn’t happen in the novel and is totally out of
character), the next seductive. I’m not at all sure about Sam Claflin. He’s
incredibly unconvincing as Philip, evincing neither boyish naivety (it comes across as petulance) nor enthusiasm. Together
they create a charisma vacuum that sucks the life out of the rest of the film.
The scenes seem to chop and change pointlessly so a single conversation
jumps from an interior to two or three exterior shots, giving us the uneasy
sensation that the characters are for some reason having the same conversation
over and over again in various locales.
Watching the film with the subtitles on makes it seem even
sillier as Rachel and Philip are forever ‘chuckling softly’ over nothing. These
chuckles are supposed to indicate the characters’ rapprochement but they are
without foundation if you leave out the dialogue.
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| Aidan does it better |
There’s an obligatory, shirtless sequence (post-Aidan
Turner’s Ross Poldark) that, although it has source in the novel, seems a weird
thing to include when you plan to leave out so much else and the cinematography
showcases the beautiful Cornish countryside much like Poldark. But one of the BBC series' virtues is that it incorporates a lot of Winston Graham's original dialogue thus we get witty repartee and barbed retorts.
Of course, I completely understand that a film might have to
concertina and alter a story a bit (the garden design/landscaping element is
left out altogether – that’s fine) for its own purposes but what we’re left
with is people behaving really oddly for no apparent reason.
By the end of the novel, the reader is certain that Rachel
is poisoning Philip just like she poisoned his cousin, with her eyes firmly
fixed on the prize of his inheritance. Michel decides to leave this one absolute open-ended
as a ‘did she? didn’t she?’, no doubt to try to pique the viewer’s interest but
it turns out to be too little too late.
What Du Maurier has depicted with the skill of an Old Master, Constable, for instance, with nuance, subtle detail and depth, Michell has rendered bold and simple in the brush strokes of a painter decorator.
* A brilliant adaptation itself of Jacqueline Wilson's book, in which all three actresses are outstanding: Alice Connor, Michelle Collins and Holliday Grainger.
For more film reviews, see secretsquirrelsays.
