Sum is somewhat less than beguiling
“The Beguiled” is an interesting film that should not be mistaken for a good film, though it probably will be. Unlike some routine release, it is guided by a particular and distinct vision and is very much the movie its director Sofia Coppola wanted to make. But the angle she takes on the material is limited and mannered. She doesn’t open up the movie’s meaning, but contracts it into a series of cold, stylistic gestures.
The film is based on the 1966 novel by Thomas Cullinan, which was the basis of a 1971 film starring Clint Eastwood and directed by Don Siegel. The setting is Virginia, in the last year of the Civil War. A wounded Union corporal is discovered in the woods by a little Southern girl, who helps carry him back to the girls’ school where she lives. There, he becomes the prisoner and fascination of all the girls and women in the household.
As the corporal (Colin Farrell) recovers from his injury, the central question becomes what will happen to him next. If the women turn him over to the Confederate Army, he will almost certainly die in a prison camp — the Confederate POW prisons were hellholes of inhumanity. If they turn him loose, he’ll probably be captured or killed. So it’s in the corporal’s interest to ingratiate himself to his captors, especially to the headmistress (Nicole Kidman) but also to her assistant (Kirsten Dunst).
In reviving this material, Coppola’s innovation, her single big idea, was to tell the story from the standpoint of the women. The Siegel film, though it also delved into the mind of the headmistress, more or less stayed within the thoughts and perspective of the corporal. Thus, we always knew what he was doing and why he was doing it. Coppola’s idea, to do the reverse, had promise, except that she lards it within suffocating style touches and pulls back from embracing the wildness and vitality of the story.
For a time, the stakes and the peculiarity of the situation arrest our attention, and so does the austere beauty of dawn as seen through the trees or the orange mist of candlelight in an old, dark house. But these are not, in the end, narrative strategies. They are grace notes and embellishments, and about midway through, “The Beguiled” loses the illusion of urgency. Coppola doesn’t illuminate the women or their motivations. They remain vague and at a distance. Instead we get studied arrangements of women within the frame, as though the mere placing of them in AddamsFamily-like compositions were a form of revelation.
The Addams Family reference isn’t entirely casual. Coppola infuses the film with an attitude that leaves room for a certain kind eeriness, but one that is postmodern and arch and invites knowing audience laughter. “The Beguiled” is almost funny, but it’s almost a lot of things — almost revealing, almost honest, almost effective.
In the end, the problem with Coppola’s approach isn’t the nature of the approach itself but that it yields so little. The women’s reasons for doing what they do are rarely clear and, when clear, never compelling, and the corporal is reduced to a pathetic figure. Ultimately, this is a story about sexuality and the effects of repression, but the movie seems to repress itself. Far from a feminist statement, “The Beguiled” is barely a statement at all, just a series of weird, uninflected events that the movie is too cool to care about.
I should probably add that the Coppola version was my first experience of “The Beguiled,” but that after seeing it, I went and saw the 1971 Don Siegel version. Have you ever been nearsighted and then finally put on a pair of glasses? In the Siegel version, the whole story became clear, had power and made emotional and stylistic sense. The soldier became dimensional, which is perhaps not a surprise, but so did the women. For example, Geraldine Page, in the headmistress role played by Kidman, had a lot more to do and more to express.
A black slave, Hallie (Mae Mercer), is one of the most significant characters in the Siegel film, a woman coming into an awareness of her power. Coppola cut that role entirely. Why? A politically correct reluctance to depict slavery? A desire not to upset the pristine tableau of austere blondes staring off into space? Perhaps it was some other reason. But that and the movie’s bloodless presentation of sexuality make Coppola’s “The Beguiled” seem not just restrained, but inhibited, modern timidity given a stylish veneer.