Tamara Drewe
Sep. 23rd, 2010 11:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missingopossumCinema visit: Tamara Drewe
We ran it close with not going to see this at all; the trailer was selling a sort of grown-up Carry-On film full of sexual comedy and farce, and that's not entirely my idea of a good time. Or rather, to be more precise farce is not my idea of humour – as for the sex, I was actually a little disappointed that the lead character was somewhat less sex-positive and sexually confident than I had expected from the trailer. What swung it was partly Gemma Artheron's name on it, since she starred in one of the best films I've seen this year (very small indie piece called The Disappearance Of Alice Creed – absolutely amazing three-person drama that I can't recommend highly enough) and that makes a film worth a second look. The clincher was the 80-90% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and no mention of farce; I really do love that website for being able to get a wide overview of what to expect from a film.
So on the whole this was fun, funny and also a lovely piece of layered storytelling, with some very well-observed characters thrown in as well. However, I can't comment at all on one very large facet of this film; it's based around the plot of Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd and since that's a novel I've never read I can't really comment on how well that works. However, the convoluted and overlapping character-arcs are very authentically Victorian in feel and also work very well in their own right.
I loved both the portrayal and the writing of the two schoolgirls whose interference drives most of the plot. In particular, it would have been incredibly easy to both write and play Jody, the leading troublemaker, as unlikeable and meddlesome but the attention paid to both her motivations and her background make for a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of an intelligent person trapped in the horrfying emotional maelstrom of small-town adolescence and not dealing with it at all gracefully. And I would like to make an observation about one of my favourite parts of the entire film but I'm well aware that it might constitute something of a spoiler – be warned! Jody is head over heels in idol worship for the rock-god that Tamara is seeing for some of the film and spends a substantial amount of time blindly messing up other people's lives for the sake of a chance to meet him. Towards the end of the film she does and the last sequence is of her jokingly posing for photos with him – and in a delightful piece of storytelling the end-credits music follows the story just a little further. “Jailbait Jody” is the rock-god's heartfelt tribute to “the one” and a promise to wait for her – and this also ties very neatly back into the ongoing theme of relationships across relatively large age gaps. I loved the idea of sneakily tying up Jody's story like that – she was so desperate to leave her small-town life that getting a glimpse of her having done just that was a pleasing post-script. All in all, it had the same effect as footnotes or appendices in a novel.
Another character who was subtly well-written was Nicholas' wife Beth. On the one hand she's a stereotypically dowdy and down-trodden wife of a serially unfaithful sleazebag. But on the other, she is also her husband's private editor and personal assistant, as well as being a busy and competent manager taking care of the writers' retreat business she runs, and lastly managing the organic farm. Oh, and did I forget to manage that she's also a mother? It's a quietly well-drawn portrait of a very capable and talented individual who's the first person to deny her capability and talents and a very nice piece of writing. Her story-arc ends up well for her, which I was pleased about; I somehow think the good guys win and bad guys lose template may have been rather deeply engrained in the orginal novel.
As to what I thought of the title character, that's an interesting question; I understand that she was being painted as someone coming to terms with a difficult childhood and adolescence and making some bad choices as part of that process. But even so I had some major moral problems with Tamara's choice to get involved with Nicholas. I'm in a longstanding poly relationship with my partner of ten years and while neither of us are often involved with other people consent is absolutely vital when it does happen; gaily sleeping with someone behind the back of their partner is therefore particularly jarring for me. Ethical non-monogamy is part and parcel of my world-view so the distinctly non-ethical variety displayed here really lost me a lot of sympathy for Tamara and all the more so because it was made very clear indeed that it was entirely conscious deceit and without even the (admittedly poor) excuse of her thinking being clouded by love.
We ran it close with not going to see this at all; the trailer was selling a sort of grown-up Carry-On film full of sexual comedy and farce, and that's not entirely my idea of a good time. Or rather, to be more precise farce is not my idea of humour – as for the sex, I was actually a little disappointed that the lead character was somewhat less sex-positive and sexually confident than I had expected from the trailer. What swung it was partly Gemma Artheron's name on it, since she starred in one of the best films I've seen this year (very small indie piece called The Disappearance Of Alice Creed – absolutely amazing three-person drama that I can't recommend highly enough) and that makes a film worth a second look. The clincher was the 80-90% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and no mention of farce; I really do love that website for being able to get a wide overview of what to expect from a film.
So on the whole this was fun, funny and also a lovely piece of layered storytelling, with some very well-observed characters thrown in as well. However, I can't comment at all on one very large facet of this film; it's based around the plot of Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd and since that's a novel I've never read I can't really comment on how well that works. However, the convoluted and overlapping character-arcs are very authentically Victorian in feel and also work very well in their own right.
I loved both the portrayal and the writing of the two schoolgirls whose interference drives most of the plot. In particular, it would have been incredibly easy to both write and play Jody, the leading troublemaker, as unlikeable and meddlesome but the attention paid to both her motivations and her background make for a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of an intelligent person trapped in the horrfying emotional maelstrom of small-town adolescence and not dealing with it at all gracefully. And I would like to make an observation about one of my favourite parts of the entire film but I'm well aware that it might constitute something of a spoiler – be warned! Jody is head over heels in idol worship for the rock-god that Tamara is seeing for some of the film and spends a substantial amount of time blindly messing up other people's lives for the sake of a chance to meet him. Towards the end of the film she does and the last sequence is of her jokingly posing for photos with him – and in a delightful piece of storytelling the end-credits music follows the story just a little further. “Jailbait Jody” is the rock-god's heartfelt tribute to “the one” and a promise to wait for her – and this also ties very neatly back into the ongoing theme of relationships across relatively large age gaps. I loved the idea of sneakily tying up Jody's story like that – she was so desperate to leave her small-town life that getting a glimpse of her having done just that was a pleasing post-script. All in all, it had the same effect as footnotes or appendices in a novel.
Another character who was subtly well-written was Nicholas' wife Beth. On the one hand she's a stereotypically dowdy and down-trodden wife of a serially unfaithful sleazebag. But on the other, she is also her husband's private editor and personal assistant, as well as being a busy and competent manager taking care of the writers' retreat business she runs, and lastly managing the organic farm. Oh, and did I forget to manage that she's also a mother? It's a quietly well-drawn portrait of a very capable and talented individual who's the first person to deny her capability and talents and a very nice piece of writing. Her story-arc ends up well for her, which I was pleased about; I somehow think the good guys win and bad guys lose template may have been rather deeply engrained in the orginal novel.
As to what I thought of the title character, that's an interesting question; I understand that she was being painted as someone coming to terms with a difficult childhood and adolescence and making some bad choices as part of that process. But even so I had some major moral problems with Tamara's choice to get involved with Nicholas. I'm in a longstanding poly relationship with my partner of ten years and while neither of us are often involved with other people consent is absolutely vital when it does happen; gaily sleeping with someone behind the back of their partner is therefore particularly jarring for me. Ethical non-monogamy is part and parcel of my world-view so the distinctly non-ethical variety displayed here really lost me a lot of sympathy for Tamara and all the more so because it was made very clear indeed that it was entirely conscious deceit and without even the (admittedly poor) excuse of her thinking being clouded by love.
