Film
MY COUSIN RACHEL (12A) CHURCHILL (PG) You can see why film-makers are drawn to the novels of Daphne du Maurier. Those big, melodramatic plots, full of intrigue, strong emotion and people being Very Bad Indeed. The great houses. And the Cornish coastline! If you have spent any time there, you will know it’s constantly being strafed by helicopters, either scouting for locations or actually filming them. It’s amazing anyone in the county ever gets any sleep.
My Cousin Rachel (12A) kicks off with some fine aerial shots of the seascape, and doesn’t really let up thereafter. Sam Claflin plays Philip, orphaned ward of a rich man who lives in an enormous house. Philip shaves only infrequently, and has floppy hair that makes him look tortured, which is convenient, as that does seem to be Claflin’s thing. (He played a quadriplegic in Me Without You and an arc light fell on his head in Their Finest.) His protector, having moved to Italy for his health, falls in love and marries a mysterious woman, Rachel Ashley, whose machinations may or may not lead to his death. Philip is convinced of her guilt on almost no evidence but, when she arrives on his doorstep, she is played by Rachel Weisz, with her amazing mobile eyebrows.
Philip is smitten and, let’s face it, so are we. Rachel, helpfully playing Rachel, is charming and ever so slightly terrifying, and the rest of the film is not so much of a Whodunnit as a Did She Do It? Sometimes you think she did, sometimes you think she didn’t, and sometimes you think, what on earth is going on and why am I watching this rubbish?
For Philip is the most annoying character in the world. Sure, this is the 18th century, and he is not the most experienced young man, having never apparently met a woman, let alone seen her ankles, but really. Weisz dominates the screen, as you’d expect: hers is a proper star performance. But if the film doesn’t take off, it’s as much to do with the plotting as anything else. The esteemed director Roger Michell wrote his own script, and I’m not sure that was the best idea. For instance, before Rachel arrives, Philip is lounging around his enormous house, which is disgustingly squalid and has at least an inch of dust on every surface. Let’s clean it up, says his fragrant young friend, Louise. So, with a mop and possibly a duster, the two of them turn it into an elegant, National Trust-style show house within an afternoon. And your first thought is, it would take 20 people three weeks to do what you’ve just done.
The whole film is full of these moments that don’t ring true. You end up wondering what it all meant, and not coming to any firm conclusions about anything. This is not ideal.
Churchill (PG) is a British attempt to do for our greatest prime minister what Lincoln did for Abraham. But while Lincoln was monumental and celebratory, Churchill is quiet, ambivalent and slightly more questioning. It concentrates on the week before D-day, when Winston had a crisis of confidence about what we were going to do, and made a huge effort to stop it happening
He was wrong and he failed and, while these are interesting facts, I’m not sure they are strong enough to carry a film. Brian Cox is magnificent as Churchill, and Miranda Richardson even better as Clemmie, but there are slightly too many scenes in which people look into the middle distance and think deep thoughts. Cheap scenes to film, but exciting? No.