Tamara Drewe: Vaguely feminist farmland farce hardly Hardy but not half-bad either

Based on Posey Simmonds’ graphic novel, itself a clever, loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Maddening Crowd, Tamara Drewe is set largely in and around a rural Dorset writer’s colony, where a celebrated mystery novelist’s under-loved helpmeet (Tamsin Grieg) serves nummy snacks in dowdy turtlenecks, functions as an unacknowledged editor of sorts to her numerous and apparently mostly talentless residents, attempts to tolerate her husband’s philandering, and gradually kens on to the fact that the shlubby American Hardy scholar (Bill Camp) who keeps coming back to massage his writer’s block is probably falling hopelessly in love with her.

This is a rather sprawling ensemble comedy, so that’s not even the half of what’s going on in Moira Buffini’s adaptation—I haven’t yet introduced the titular character, who isn’t exactly the heroine of the piece but, most pleasingly embodied by Gemma Arterton, is quite obviously its star, a successful young journalist returning to her country home after years away with a new nose and a body to keep the cocks crowing night and day, making her grand appearance in ass-exposing cut-offs and a five-alarm red tank-top. Before we’re through she’ll have wittingly or unwittingly seduced a pretentious London rocker (Dominic Cooper), an even more pretentious middle-aged scribe (Roger Allam), and the local ex-con farm hunk (Luke Evans, sort of a less crazed-looking Michael Shannon) who opens the film shirtless and sweating against the setting sun in a tableau that could grace the cover of any six-dozen Harlequin Romances.

All this business—there’s still the mischievous teenage chorus to work in!—makes for a precarious balancing act. The multiple narratives are well-structured enough to keep us oriented, but from the get-go the overall tone slips into a decidedly broad brand of British comedy, replete with pissing cows and one guy eavesdropping while dropping a log, and Buffini’s dialogue is at times so on the nose—“She doesn’t need a writer; she needs a man!”—it’s nearly comical during those rare scenes that seem designed to be otherwise. The landscapes meanwhile are lovely, the story’s divided into seasons, and the occasional glimpse of London makes the big city seem dreary even for the rich. Director Stephen Frears seems at his best here when nurturing connections between his largely superb cast, as well as when emphasizing the script’s loving homage to bucolic life and sexually empowered women and its barely contained disdain for artsy retreats and emotionally immature men. Having said that, if a couple of the guys were more interesting, it may have elevated the film as a whole.

Knocked Up: Keira Knightley strives for something more than bad sex, nice hats and male babies in The Duchess

Near the start of The Duchess, Georgiana Spencer (Keira Knightley), newly wed to the deeply dour Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes), critiques a long-winded dinner party speech made by Charles Fox (the wonderful Simon McBurney), declaring dubious his rhetoric about freedom in moderation. One is or isn’t free, Georgiana counters, it is not subject to degrees. It’s one of those movie moments seemingly designed to convey the precociousness of the protagonist, yet, in an interesting reversal of the convention, the next hour and a half of The Duchess will pretty much sink that theory of hers to the bottom of the ocean: Georgiana herself will indeed know the taste of freedom, but it will never be open to her fully.

Based on Amanda Foreman’s biography, Saul Dibb’s The Duchess is a smartly constructed, only slightly overcooked historical feminist tear-jerker, ushering Georgiana into dreary wedlock with one royally cold fish. The Duke’s exclusive interest in producing male progeny requires him only to comfortably house his wife and stick it in every now and then like some devout if lifeless gambler mechanically plugging so many coins into the slots. Like any prudent gambler—and closet rapist—he also circulates the room and tries his hand at other suitable receptacles, eventually taking as his live-in mistress one Bess Foster (Hayley Atwell), a homeless aristocrat and battered woman both more bosomy than his wife and bearing a solid track record for birthing males. (And in one especially splendid little boudoir scene, Bess also proves herself a trusty sexual therapist for the whole family.) This same courtesy is not extended to Georgiana, whose affair with future prime minister Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper) ends prematurely in some nasty blackmail orchestrated by the Duke and reinforced by Georgiana’s own mom (Charlotte Rampling).

Bouncing between a public persona as celebrity political campaigner and formidable fashionista and a private life of sexual frustration and emotional neglect tempered only by her embracing of motherhood, Knightley really is quite impressive here, embodying both sassy poise in a delicious array of hats, chokers, wigs and gowns, and frailty veiled by the same opulent wardrobe, her delicate figure slowly collapsing before our eyes as the manor walls close in. Fiennes on the other hand is an altogether different sort of presence in the film, certainly more static. His casting’s hardly imaginative and his masterful way with eliminating all signs of human warmth gives him almost nowhere to go. Yet even within the confinements of his role there’s considerable nuance to enjoy, and I suppose its Fiennes’ extremes of reserve that make his final, very subtle truce with Georgiana oddly affecting. Okay, like, really oddly.  

Dibb’s particular framing keeps certain otherwise purely functional sequences engaging, often observing Knightley in profile so as to better trace the gradual wearying of her spine, while clearly favouring Cooper’s hunky physique in their scenes of intimacy. He doesn’t fuss too much over royal pageantry and even throws up the final series of what-happened-later over well-chosen images instead of over the usual drawn-out blacks. Dibb also has the good sense to leave all similarities to later beloved English roses also named Spencer who were also tragically thrust into loveless royal marriages entirely up to the deductive powers of the audience.