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Author:
Joyces Choices
Joyce Kulhawik, best known as the Emmy Award-winning arts and entertainment critic for CBS-Boston (WBZ-TV 1981-2008), is currently lending her expertise as an arts critic/advocate, motivational speaker, and cancer crusader. Kulhawik is President of the Boston Theater Critics Association, a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, and Boston Online Film Critics Association. Kulhawik has covered local and national events from Boston and Broadway to Hollywood, reporting live from the Oscars, the Emmys, and the Grammys. Nationally, Kulhawik has co-hosted syndicated movie-review programs with Roger Ebert and Leonard Maltin. Look for her arts & entertainment reviews online at JoycesChoices.com
Comments:
For a late October weekend– two movies whose houses are haunted: REBECCA and THE NEST.
I have always loved the original– Alfred Hitchcock’s Oscar-winning gothic masterpiece REBECCA based on Daphne du Maurier’s novel about wealthy widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) who brings his new wife (Joan Fontaine) home to his sprawling English country estate, Manderley, which is presided over by the most foreboding housekeeper who ever kept a house, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson). The house remains haunted by Mrs. Danvers obsessive attachment to her late mistress as well as everyone’s recollections of the first Mrs. de Winter, the glamorous, worldly beauty, Rebecca. It’s hard to imagine why or who would want to remake this dark, gleaming gem of a film, and having seen the remake, I wish it would fall into the sea and be washed away forever…
REBECCA
The just-released, fully decked-out 2020 remake REBECCA, shot in color, pales beside the silvery glamor of the original. A spectral gothic romance has been replaced by obvious romantic melodrama, dated and flat. Armie Hammer plays a jaunty Maxim de Winter, a blonde god whose sudden outbursts seem to signal a personality disorder rather than a dark secret. Lily James as the perky new Mrs. de Winter, cavorts through Manderley in loose trousers and a beret, alternating between spunk and funk. Her character here makes little emotional sense; a girl this impulsive, independent and inquisitive would have challenged her husband early on– but that would have been a different movie. As it is, James can’t find a coherent balance between the mores of the time that required her to tolerate her husband’s out of nowhere moodiness, and the modern sensibility with which she’s invested this performance.
The screenwriters and director Ben Wheatley have botched a consistent or compelling tone and sensibility, and at moments left us stranded in time and space. Near the climax, the second Mrs. de Winter traipses over the wild landscape (presumably to show off the scenery) and into the night for hours, and we have no idea where she’s going or why, what time it is, or when she last ate. I will say, Kristin Scott Thomas takes a decent stab at the austere and now faintly attractive Mrs. Danvers, about whose background and motives we learn more. But the overwrought ending was laughable, and the secrets uncovered felt un-horrifyingly half-baked. REBECCA 2020 has turned Daphne du Maurier’s novel into a Nancy Drew mystery. REBECCA is a NETFLIX FILM now released in selected theaters.
THE NEST
BUT THERE IS an excellent, recently released, psychological and “emotional” gothic horror film that you may have overlooked but is just right for the times: THE NEST. Jude Law turns in a complex, gripping performance as an ambitious financial entrepreneur who returns to London with his American wife (Carrie Coon) and family (Oona Roche, Charlie Shotwell). After they move into a sprawling country manor, the family begins to fall apart and everything turns dark. Tensions escalate between the couple, the children start to go astray, and the walls themselves seem to harbor ghosts.
Writer/director Sean Durkin (“Martha Marcy May Marlene“) meticulously calibrates the tone– that of lurking dread–as the film gradually zeroes in on the source of the creeping disturbance. Every inch of this house feels cold, every corner an abyss. Is the danger within or without? As tension builds, the couple’s interactions ebb and flow with the jagged undercurrents of their troubled marriage. The writer/director demonstrates an intimate understanding of the fallout of a damaged human heart, and the house becomes a metaphor for festering psychic wounds bubbling up from the past to infect the here and now. The denouement leaves us a shard of hope. There are excellent performances all around and Law’s performance is among his best, perfectly capitalizing on this actor’s ability to simultaneously convey disturbing charm and simmering cruelty. SEE “THE NEST.” An IFC Film released in theaters on September 18 and VOD November 17….. read more
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10/24/2020