#47
Post
by Brian C » Tue Jul 18, 2017 10:06 am
I love Coppola but I can't help but be disappointed by this, and it's hard to know what my objection is, exactly. I'm not familiar with the Siegel so I'm not wedded to the idea that this material demands a pulpier approach - in fact, the descriptions of the Siegel that I've read make it sound kind of awful. At the same time, though, it's curious to me how Coppola, whose work thus far has been unfailingly personal and idiosyncratic, has managed to make a movie that simply doesn't feel very distinctive. As noted by others, the photography is beautiful, but other than that, I didn't feel there was anything here to mark this as any different than a million other melodramatic period pieces.
To this point, her work has been so driven by focus on character, but here, there's nothing to say for these characters that couldn't be assumed by simply reading a plot synopsis. The women and girls are neatly assigned "types" that they stick to. There's little sense in how these characters live their day-to-day lives or what the dynamics between them are when the colonel is not around (or, frankly for that matter, when he is around). We're definitely told he's a disruptive presence, but not given any real idea what he's disrupting, aside from the obvious fact that he's a man in a place populated exclusively by females. This world is too neat and self-contained - we're reminded often by dialogue that the war is ongoing around them, but there's not much sense of how this affects them either physically or psychologically.
I think perhaps a problem here is that the movie is just too short. We're not given any time to know these people or get a sense of their lives. Curiously for a Coppola movie, it seems rushed to get from Point A to Point B of the plot, and therefore too much time is spent on the characters played by Farrell, Kidman, and Dunst, and not enough on the full ensemble, and there's no time to just let these characters live. Coppola's most distinctive quality as a director is her ability to create these wonderfully unique moods, but I don't think she's successful in that regard here. It just feels ... ordinary, and I've never before felt that watching her films.