Allegedly, Sofia Coppola was drawn to remake The Beguiled by a desire to gender-flip the narrative, to make it an examination of the experience of white women during the American Civil War. I've not read the source material or seen the prior adaptation, but by reputation it's a sleazy bit of Southern Gothic pulp, and reversing the emphasis of that to a feminine viewpoint seems like a challenging undertaking, especially when attempting to build on sexual repression and boredom, which are inherently difficult emotions to represent on screen.
Coppola's effort is intriguing and occasionally strikes a resonant note, but her efforts to make the material more dignified and respectable have sapped it of all life, and the new film's needlessly brief 93-minute runtime comes at the expense of necessary context which would have greatly enhanced its intuitive storytelling. There's some merit in expecting the audience to bring prior knowledge to project onto the film, but combined with the flatness of the direction here, it's resulted in an often dull viewing experience whose merits are largely subjective to the point of invisibility.
In the American Civil War, Amy (Oona Laurence), a student at an all-women boarding school, finds a wounded Union soldier named McBurney (Colin Farrell) and brings him home to the school. The school has been made empty and isolated by the war, so when McBurney arrives, the students are enthusiastic for this break in their monotonous lives, despite the objections of the teacher Edwina (Kirsten Dunst). Also starring Nicole Kidman and Kirsten Dunst.
For the most part, the girls are indistinguishable aside from their specific hair braids. Some have stronger relationships with McBurney, some are a little more youthful, and Amy stands out with her relatively non-sexual relationship with McBurney, but Edwina aside, almost all of these characters are defined by their relationship with the man in their lives. The film doesn't spend much time developing the relationships between these women, so they all become blank ciphers, impossible to be invested in. Reportedly, the film has been chopped down from the source material to meet its brisk 93 minutes, but aside from questionably removing any hints of slavery from the Civil War South, it also diminishese the film's character relationships to almost nothing.
Furthermore, despite Coppola's best efforts, McBurney's aphrodisiac presence still feels like an indulgence of female stereotypes, While it's clear that he breaks up the monotony of the school, without more clarity regarding the situation there before his arrival, this change in atmosphere is largely meaningless. It goes a small distance to justifying how these women are suddenly happy the moment there's a man in their life, but not enough to remove the odious implications of the premise.
To be fair, there are points where the film briefly achieves some clarity. For instance, elements of obligation creep into its depiction of religion: Edwina brings in McBurney because she's reminded it'd be "the Christian thing to do," and subsequently she treats prayer almost like a chore. Another character is distracted from prayer by spending time with McBurney, neglecting faith as if she has no attachment to it. Additionally, there's occasional hints of how the war has ripped these women's lives from them; the absence of men rids some of fathers and others of sexual partners. At the same time, because of the war, men are constantly a potential danger, and this dichotomy leads to the film's few points of genuine tension.
The problem is that The Beguiled doesn't do a whole lot with this. As the brazenly misleading trailer shows (seriously, studios, stop this shit), the tension between McBurney and the women eventually bursts into violence, but without a stronger contrast between the world before and after his presence, this is ultimately meaningless. The trailer sells the brief climax as the driving force of the film, but it actually spends little time on McBurney snapping, and when he does, whatever character study the film was shooting for vanishes as the film sinks into generic thriller territory. McBurney is a violent man who is eventually brought to commit yet another violent deed, but the film unwisely depicts him as polite and relaxed, if sexually immoral, up until he snaps. He's an objectified body, then he's a lumbering brute, and that's fine, but there's not very much else to him or his role in the story.
More importantly, Coppola's placid, droning direction is utterly devoid of spark, lacking the atmosphere of tension or sexual repression which would have made this story work and instead replacing it with a gloomy stasis, overstuffed with flashy establishing shots and the background noises of birds and insects. Occasionally, gunshots are heard from afar, reminding us how much the war has taken, but mostly there's a glum silence to the whole affair, and that dampens the film's attempts at humour, which aren't terribly strong to begin with. Furthermore, The Beguiled almost exclusively uses natural lighting, and this results in a frequently dark-looking movie, with long shadows cast over nearly every object. Even in the dark, props are easily visible, but the muted palette affects the mood.
In theory, the moody atmosphere ought to complement the film's paranoia, but without McBurney demonstrating any menace until the final act, there's no tension. This is worsened by Coppola's reliance on languidly-paced scenes filled with pointlessly arty angles, which maintain the oppressive tone but utterly fail to build any sort of tension. The establishing shots often contribute to the school's feeling of isolation, and the characters' interests are emphasized through subtle gesture, but rarely do these gestures contribute to anything not already made explicit through exposition or story. You get the feeling of these women being relieved from something, and you get the sense of that something being caused at least in part from the war, but it's not satisfying or even particularly revealing because the film expects the audience to bring their own context.
Obviously, I've missed the point here, but the problem with The Beguiled is that it doesn't offer enough in the way of enticing visuals or atmosphere to overcome its opaque themes. All the directoral choices, while aesthetically unique, flatten the tone to the point of diminishing any potential camp factor, and unlike, say, Under the Skin, the slow-paced storytelling doesn't offer up anything visually interesting enough to compensate. At its core, this story appears to be a pulpy melodrama, and whatever point Coppola's version might find in the material, it drains the source material of whatever surface pleasures it might have had, so without getting the point, I'm only left with scraps of artistry and a lot of boredom.
5/10
+ At times quite pretty.
+ Occasional interesting thematic digression.
+ Intuitive storytelling is admirable in theory.
- Tonally oppressive to the point of tedium.
- Clipped storytelling lacks satisfying character arcs.
- Themes are opaque and insufficiently contextualized.
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Todd Throndson
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