James gives it a heroic shot in retelling of classic tale of romance and mystery
If there were any lingering doubts that Lily James was capable of taking the Joan Fontaine role in a new version of Rebecca, recent events in Rome surely dispelled them.
Popping up in a glamorous corner of southern Europe on the arm of a wealthy older man who owns an imposing home in the South West of England? This girl is the Daniel Day-lewis of Second Mrs de Winters.
Yet even setting aside the – ahem – fortuitous timing of James’s headlinegrabbing clinch with Dominic West last weekend, when it comes to adapting Daphne du Maurier’s classic gothic romance, stepping into someone else’s still-warm shoes is all part of the deal. Any new take is doomed to be compared to Alfred Hitchcock’s masterful original, with Fontaine and Laurence Olivier, which for the last 80 years has essentially been a Mrs de Winter No 1 in film form: whatever they try, it’s the one that just can’t be surpassed.
Nevertheless, this latest contender gives it a heroic shot. It’s a glossy and easy-to-swallow Working Title production directed by Ben Wheatley, whose flair for the English Eerie was already writ large in films such as Kill List, Sightseers and A Field in England. The 2020 Rebecca opens in UK cinemas this weekend before landing on Netflix next Wednesday: something we’ll surely be seeing more of as the market tries to regain its footing.
Not that cinemagoers themselves are likely to find themselves thrown off balance. Scripted with cool proficiency by Jane Goldman, the film sticks even more closely to Du Maurier’s novel than did Hitchcock’s – who was constrained at the time both by his formidable new Hollywood producer, David O Selznick, and the recently implemented Hays Code, which tightly governed every studio production’s internal moral mechanisms. Here, the original novel’s more brutal twist is restored, while some of the lesbian subtext of the housekeeper Mrs Danvers – here played by a joyously imperious Kristin Scott Thomas – is coaxed back into the sunlight. Overall, it’s a highly polished and enjoyable watch that feels a little hemmed in by convention. You can sometimes sense the film gearing up to take a risk, holding its breath, then not quite convincing itself to go through with it.
The casting is certainly safe. In addition to James as our unnamed heroine and Scott Thomas’s bloodfreezing Danvers, there is Armie Hammer as a strapping, preppy, more age-appropriate Maxim de Winter – high society’s most eligible young widower. When James meets him in Monte Carlo, she’s there as a companion to the grotesque Mrs Van Hopper (Ann Dowd), though ends up spending more time with this debonair yet enigmatic aristo. In a mustard linen three-piece, Hammer looks like an enormous, human-shaped novelty trophy – and James, with neither fortune nor connections, turns out to be the unlikely young woman to lift him. Yet after the famous “little fool” snap proposal and a whistle-stop honeymoon, Manderley awaits them – as does the first Mrs de Winter’s unbanishable shadow within.
The music that accompanies their return is a haunting Sixties folk ballad by Pentangle: the kind of thrillingly idiosyncratic choice of a kind you may end up wishing Wheatley’s film would make more often than it does. See also the unexpected attention paid to the lives of the folk below stairs – conjuring memories of James’s old stomping ground of Downton Abbey, but also John Schlesinger’s steamy 1967 adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd. It is the earthy, mercurial Schlesinger, rather than the calculating Hitchcock, who feels like a guiding spirit for Wheatley here – while James is more of a Julie Christie than a Joan Fontaine. Her modern mix of vulnerability and mettle brings a sexual frisson to both her relationship with Hammer’s Maxim and to a Cornwall of the Thirties.
The film does make a point of giving its heroine more to do in its busy final stretch, dispatching her to London on a solo clandestine mission while the climactic scandal unfolds. But the already hectic last act feels too rushed to be empowering, and makes her affiliation with Maxim more balanced and collaborative than it should.
I know, I know: damned when it does its own thing, damned when it doesn’t.
But there’s no contradiction in believing a fresh and daring retelling of Rebecca was entirely possible with this exact cast and crew, but the fruit of their labours isn’t it.
Does that matter? Almost certainly not for anyone discovering the story for the first time, nor for whom two hours of sleek gothic romance counts as an evening well spent, and in this case, it absolutely does. As for those of us hoping for more weirdness, carnality and menace – well, like Mrs de W No 2, lost in her Manderley memories, one can always dream.
Rebecca opens in UK cinemas today and launches on Netflix on Nov 21.