OVERWHELMED by GREAT ACTRESSES, the Vampire gives it his best LEER

Liz Smith from the Huffington Post had similar reactions to mine (earlier post: “Bel Ami, a World Where Women Don’t Matter”) when she saw the movie, BEL AMI.  Thank goodness.  I thought it was just I sensing faded vampire in Pattinson’s acting and hero worshipping Uma Thurman’s skill.  I feared I was just a dumb movie watcher.  But no, the proof’s there on screen.  The women overwhelm.  And the pity’s that I bet the spin was all about Pattinson in a challenging and career enhancing role.  He’s as much clinging to the skirt tails of these women’s acting skills as his character is to the fictional society women he beds in his climb to the top.    

Smith posted in 2012, just before the movie came out:  “SPEAKING OF interesting messes of movies… “Bel Ami” starring Robert Pattinson, Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci and Kristin Scott Thomas…. The women make this movie. In fact, they make the movie well worth seeing!”

So, hooray to Uma, Christina and Kristin!  Definitely women worth watching.  Even if their roles require them to be duped and screwed and then tossed aside by lesser actors and men.

Here’s the Huffington Post link:

Liz Smith: Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci And Kristin Scott Thomas Overwhelm Robert Pattinson In ‘Bel Ami’.

BEL AMI, a world where WOMEN DON’T MATTER

BEL AMI is a recently produced movie about a time in European history when women could use their wiles as behind-the-scenes influencers but men steered the vessels.

Hey, isn’t that basically ANY time in recent history?

Even the casting in this  movie version of Guy de Maupassant’s book follows suit.  Top notch actresses take secondary roles playing women who are secretly influential, and an inferior actor gets the part of the  leading man benefiting directly from their influence.  Fiction and reality coincide.

And he got paid the big bucks, apparently.  Hope the ladies did, too.

I happened upon the film while channel surfing on TV.  The log line interested me:  “A chronicle of a young man’s rise to power in Paris via his manipulation of the city’s most influential and wealthy women.”

Paris and influential women.  That brought to mind my own research subject, the artist Susan Watkins, who earned acceptance by the Academie in Paris, was heading towards greater fame,

fr. Chrysler Museum files, Susan Watkins 1875-1913

and died young, having accepted a longtime suitor’s proposal of marriage, which, due to societal injunctions, required she put down her beloved brush.  Huge question mark for me, that.  What causes a woman to stop pursuing the thing she’s fought for the right to do all her life?  Love?  Hm… Maybe.

So, BEL AMI.  If it’s about Paris and influential women, thought I, then it wouldn’t be a waste of my time to watch.  Guy de Maupassant (1850- 1893) wrote short stories set in exactly Susan’s time period.  Great and easy research, just watching.  Besides, I could always change the channel.

I stuck with BEL AMI for two reasons; no, three.  One, the utterly DELECTABLE period costuming and sets which captivate from the opening scene onward.  Who can argue with late nineteenth century Paris for scenery?

And reason two? Kristin Scott Thomas’ name flashed past in the early credits before I channel surfed away.  Really admire her.  And reason three?

UMA THURMAN!!!

I will watch any thing Uma is in.  She fascinates me.  I have read she’s actively seeking scripts for “older” women, willing, apparently, to age gracefully in her roles.  Thank goodness.

Pattinson, the lead, spends MUCH on-screen time looking like his vampire self.  Since I have not read de Maupassant’s book, I do not know if the over-showing of Pattinson being vampiric- in this instance manipulative, through sexuality, of the lead women- is the director’s choice or the script’s, written, incidentally, by a woman, Rachel Bennett.

Pattinson’s a hot commodity right now.  He’s recently encroached upon my enjoyment of serious literature.  I was shocked, upon opening a package from Amazon, to discover that my choice was “Bella and Edward’s favorite,” too.  Yipee.

Depending on why you watch movies, in BEL AMI, there’s a lot of gratuitous showing of Pattinson in tux and tails and also in nothing but his birthday suit, so run out and rent the movie if you like that.  Apparently, the box office buyers do.

Was BEL AMI the movie good?  I liked it for its attention to period detail.  What a fertile, growth filled time it portrays, just before the century turned and the United States became a world power, usurping that role from the French.  And a time when women from all socio-economic backgrounds had one thing in common.  They were truly second class citizens, even in forward thinking lands.

UMA THURMAN has one of the most devastatingly direct speeches I’ve ever heard in film, delivered under duress to the impossibly vampiric and, at this point in the movie, angry, Pattinson, after the funeral of a man Pattinson suspects was her lover.

In it, she expresses exactly how a woman, fully herself and yet completely lacking control of her own personal and political freedoms, feels about someone she has deeply loved.

In it, Uma’s character, Madeleine, lays Pattinson’s character, Georges, low.  For his insensitivity to human nature and his tromping upon her female heart.

Ultimately, because of the setting, and probably the book itself, and the huge fact that the movie is about Georges, what she says becomes an aside.  An extremely well delivered aside from a woman who should have been the story’s star, leaving Pattinson to brood and glower somewhere in the grand ballroom among the other extras.  And ultimately, her character, Madeleine, gives up and gives in to her own place in society.  As did, I fear, my Susan.

Thurman’s portrayal of Madeleine is brilliant.  The women are all well played in this flick.  And the men, as a group, are good, too.  Colm Meaney, for instance, plays a dastardly Monsieur Rousset, the lead publisher at the newspaper which “starts a war,” they claim.

Ultimately, though, the story’s just about debauchery and a guy besting his betters.  I suspect this was enough theme for de Maupassant’s initial audiences.  It’s somehow unsatisfying to me, though.  No women win anything in this story, not even sexually.  But if that’s the way de Maupassant’s day would have had it, then I’m the better for having been treated to a production showing it with such delicious pageantry.  And I can get over Pattinson.  He’s not that bad.

But I do feel it very important to shout out, loudly, that THE WOMEN CARRIED THE SHOW!  Had it been more ABOUT the women, with that cast of ladies, the movie might have been a real winner.