beguiled-movie

The Beguiled ★★½

There’s a certain swampiness to Sofia Coppola’s latest film, a deliberate humidity that the movie enforces upon the audience. Not since Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy have I felt so clammy. Both films take place in the Bible Belt South, but Coppola’s film, The Beguiled, is a period piece set near the end of The Civil War in Virginia. Nicole Kidman plays Martha Farnsworth, a woman running a boarding school for girls, except the war has led most of her students to return home and their slaves to flee.  Miss Farnsworth only has six girls with her now, and they continue their lessons in French and knitting, all while the South teeters on the edge of defeat. The arrival of an injured soldier, John McBurney (Colin Farrell), rattles their ecosystem. The school’s youngest girl, Amy (Oona Laurence), discovers him in the woods, hiding behind a tree and sporting a nasty leg injury. He’s passed out from the pain by the time Amy gets him back to Farnsworth’s school, and against her best judgment, Miss Farnsworth takes McBurney in and dresses his wound.

Despite being a soldier in a rival army, McBurney’s arrival brings all sorts of excitement to the girls. His burly manliness reveals the level of sexual repression and seclusion the women have been living under since the war started. As he comes to, McBurney’s charms are on full display for all the girls to see. Alicia (Elle Fanning), the oldest of the young girls tries to catch his eye with her youthful beauty. Jane (Angourie Rice) tries to impress with her gift for music. Emily (Emma Howard) and Marie (Addison Riecke) give him warmth and kindness, while Amy’s relationship is already on solid ground as the one who initially saved him. The girls’ teacher, Miss Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) initially keeps her distance from the fallen soldier, and it is he who takes a liking to her. McBurney’s motives throughout The Beguiled are hard to pinpoint, he seems to be playing a different role for each woman. Sensitive and thoughtful to one, lustful and predatory to the next. As emotions run high between them, infighting increases between the women over McBurney’s attention.

The nature of female desire is hardly ever dissected with this much care and delicacy; not in American movies anyway. All the actresses here are exquisite, all representative of different feelings of longing, loneliness and emotional curiosity. The film is based on a Thomas P. Cullinan novel which was adapted into the 1971 version of The Beguiled starring Clint Eastwood. Coppola is stripping this story down to the only thing she cares about, which is how these women behave around this man. (It’s of note that controversy has spread in Coppola’s decision to omit a black slave character that was in both the novel and the previous film adaptation.) In The Beguiled, Coppola continues her trend of shedding story for mood, slicing plot for character. There’s a lot here that the audience has to create for themselves, which would be fine if Coppola were more adept at screenwriting archetypes but that was never really been her style, and quite frankly I think we have enough evidence to show that the fundamental basics of screenwriting is not a skill that she entirely possesses. The Beguiled is a good film, mostly because its performances are so strong and Coppola’s direction is so smooth. Its themes of female psychology are sharp and interesting, but Coppola doesn’t leave much room for anything else, and that comes at the expense of the characters.

 

Written for the Screen and Directed by Sofia Coppola