Complex ‘Rachel’ remains a mystery
Director Roger Michell finds a particular register for “My Cousin Rachel,” something different from his previous work (“Notting Hill,” “Changing Lanes”). He embraces the gothic aspect of this Daphne du Maurier tale, giving us slow-motion shots of things like pearls tumbling down a staircase, while basking in the glorious excesses of Rael Jones’ soundtrack — with its abrupt swells and sudden silences.
Michell pumps the atmosphere surrounding this story with as much life and energy as he can, without ever crossing the line into self-consciousness or parody. In doing so, he gives this film the bigness of emotion that it deserves, so that this can never be mistaken for some dry, starched British import, something that might show on Masterpiece Theater.
The opening minutes keep us guessing. At first it seems as it might indeed be one of those restrained stories of English manners, of interest only to the most ardent Anglophiles. Moments later, it seems to open up as a tale of intrigue, involving two people with a conflicting claim to a vast estate. But soon it settles into something different and far more fascinating, a movie that eludes easy classification.
Sam Claflin is Philip, a young man who thinks he has good reason to hate his cousin Rachel (Rachel Weisz), the widow of his late guardian. When he was alive, the guardian had written Philip some desperate and paranoid letters from Italy, saying that his British-Italian wife was holding him captive and slowly poisoning him. Philip can’t be sure if the guardian was deluded, the victim of a severe illness, or if he was indeed describing a genuine, concerted effort to put him 6 feet under. In any case, Philip is willing to believe the worst — he wants to believe it, hating Rachel with a young man’s gusto. And then he meets her, when she finally comes to see him and the estate that she’s heard so much about. That’s when things become complicated for the young fellow. The movie could have been called “My Cousin Rachel Weisz.” Hating her is an unsustainable position.
Much of “My Cousin Rachel” deals with the nature of Rachel and Philip’s contact, with the film’s mystery located within the soul of the title character. What is she thinking? Who is she? The movie stays within Philip’s perspective. We see her when he sees her, and we draw our own conclusions, but we can’t ever be 100 percent sure that our perceptions are correct or if Philip’s are closer to the truth.
By forcing us to stay within Philip’s vantage point, the movie makes a subtle but clear point. Sam is 24, about to turn 25. He has no conception of what is going on inside the head of a beautiful woman in her early 40s. The moral polarities that he imagines and tries to decide between don’t even apply. This woman is so complex, and so much the product of a variety of experiences and influences, that if he were to know even half of what’s inside her, his head would explode.
This dynamic between youth and young middle age is at the heart of “My Cousin Rachel” and the source of its mystery. If we watch the movie only wondering whether Rachel is good or evil, we are getting stuck inside Philip’s perspective. What’s actually going on, there for anyone to see, is bigger. The magnificence of Weisz’s performance — yes, it’s another magnificent performance from Rachel Weisz — is that she is never hiding anything, beyond what a 19th century woman might conceal out of polite reserve. In her every moment on screen, she is an open book. We’re just not seeing all her pages.
Rachel remains fixed, while Claflin’s Philip ricochets all around her, exhausting his spirit and stretching his brain to wrap around a universe beyond his comprehension. It’s a smart portrait of male desperation that manages to hit all the stages from smug confidence to panic, in a film that’s not really about vice or virtue, after all. To appreciate fully “My Cousin Rachel,” that much must be understood going in: This is not a morality tale but an illustration of the consequences of incomprehension.