Amma Asante (2013)
In 2007, an exhibition was held at Kenwood House in Hampstead to mark the bicentenary of the passing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act by the British Parliament. The exhibition included a painting of 1779 (by an unknown artist, although it was once attributed to Johann Zoffany) from the collection of the Earl of Mansfield. This painting, which normally hangs in Mansfield’s ancestral home at Scone Palace, Perth, shows two young women, Lady Elizabeth Murray and Dido Elizabeth Belle. The former is white, the latter of mixed race. The portrait was extraordinary in its time in that the attitude and positioning of the women suggest affection between them and Dido is not subordinate to Elizabeth. The English Heritage web page describes the Kenwood exhibition and supplies a potted biography of Dido Elizabeth Belle:
‘Dido Elizabeth Belle grew up at Kenwood House … She was the great-niece of William Murray, The First Earl of Mansfield, who as Lord Chief Justice presided over many of the historic cases that affected enslaved Africans. … Dido was the illegitimate daughter of Lord Mansfield’s nephew, Sir John Lindsay, a British Navy captain, and a woman (of whom it has been previously suggested, was enslaved) whom Sir John encountered while his ship was in the Caribbean. … She was sent to England by Lindsay, and from the 1760s, Dido was brought up in aristocratic surroundings at Kenwood House by the childless Lord and Lady Mansfield, along with her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray, whose mother had died.’
The film-maker Amma Asante visited this exhibition and the painting inspired her to find out more about Dido Elizabeth Belle. The result is Belle, which describes the eponymous heroine’s self-realisation as a woman of colour and her social experience both within Lord Mansfield’s household and when she and Elizabeth ‘come out’ in London society. (It’s an irony that Dido, although stigmatised because of her mixed blood, has inherited a substantial fortune from her father; the ethnically impeccable Elizabeth finds her marriageability compromised by the lack of any such dowry.) At the same time that Belle is experiencing the ways of the severely stratified world in which she lives, her great uncle is considering an appeal brought against the judgment of a lower court on the case of Gregson vs Gilbert, regarding what became known as the ‘Zong massacre’. According to Wikipedia:
‘The Zong massacre was the killing of approximately 142 enslaved Africans by the crew of the slave ship Zong in the days following 29 November 1781. The Zong was owned by a Liverpool slave-trading syndicate that had taken out insurance on the lives of the slaves as cargo. When the ship ran low on potable water following navigational mistakes, the crew threw slaves overboard into the sea to drown, in order that the remainder could survive. The owners of the Zong made a claim to their insurers for the loss of the slaves. When the insurers refused to pay, the resulting court cases held that in some circumstances the deliberate killing of slaves was legal, and that insurers could be required to pay for the slaves’ deaths. …’
The King’s Bench (Mansfield sat with two other judges although the film implies the judgment was his alone) found in favour of the insurers and overturned the verdict of the earlier trial by jury. The ruling was seen as an important one and, in combination with other judgments involving Mansfield, as helping to pave the way for the legislation of 1807. (There are references to the slave trade in Mansfield Park (1814) and it’s possible that Jane Austen named the Bertram family home with the first Earl in mind.) In other words, the inspiration for Amma Asante’s film and the subjects it deals with are extraordinarily interesting.
Yet Belle, as a drama, is awful (one good thing about going to see it is that you thereby don’t have to watch a trailer for it too – the film’s been a coming attraction at Curzon for what feels like months). Authorship of the screenplay has been the subject of arbitration by the Writers Guild of America, resulting in the writing credit going solely to Misan Sagay rather than Asante, but the script, whoever’s responsible for it, is nothing to be proud of. This isn’t because Asante and/or Sagay have played fast and loose with the historical facts, or even because of the script’s anachronistic use of ‘devastating’ or of ‘progress’ as a transitive verb. It’s because the writers have used audience expectations of the formality of dialogue in Georgian costume drama as a pretext for the speechifying that in Belle almost entirely replaces conversation. The film is perfect for people who like the sound of the moral uplift they think might be had from watching 12 Years a Slave but don’t fancy any of that disagreeable brutality. Rachel Portman’s music – a kind of syrup sledgehammer – is always on hand to tell you how you should be feeling, ie moved and eventually inspired. I usually felt embarrassed by the film’s relentless worthiness. Although Belle is visually unremarkable for the most part, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many jaws clench and bosoms heave with righteous indignation in less than two screen hours.
In spite of what they’re asked to do, some of the cast make the film watchable. I’ve never much liked Tom Wilkinson – good actor as he is, he tends to have a slightly pompous quality on screen, regardless of the role he’s playing. That’s no less true here but, as Lord Mansfield, Wilkinson draws on that quality to help create a man of convincingly divided feelings and views: he’s the most touching character in the story. Emily Watson plays his wife more subtly than the script seems to expect: she’s excellent at showing, through quietly incisive looks and inflections, how Lady Mansfield runs the household, less persuasive when she’s sizing up prospective husbands on the London circuit. This isn’t Watson’s fault: the script in these bits leaves the actress playing Lady Mansfield with no real option but to be histrionic and obvious; Watson, refusing to be either, seems merely uneasy. As Lord Mansfield’s sister Mary, Penelope Wilton looks set to be obvious too. The film laboriously establishes that Lady Mary is an old maid but it’s remarkable how much emotional depth Wilton finds in the character. Miranda Richardson, not for the first time, registers more with her first couple of lines than throughout the rest of her performance although, to be fair, the role of the hideously prejudiced and mercenary Lady Ashford isn’t one that can easily be taken to surprising places. As her husband, Alex Jennings has a much smaller part but he and his quizzically raised eyebrow are around long enough to be tedious. Matthew Goode, as Dido’s father, appears even more briefly; this would normally be a cause for regret but not in this case: Goode has to say things like ‘What is right can never be impossible!’ Lauren Julien-Box, the little girl who plays the infant Dido, is extraordinarily beautiful and her face is intriguingly hard to read when she first arrives at Kenwood and looks up at pictures in which blacks are shown as exotic appendages to the white principals: her expression is blank but you sense a mind at work underneath. She grows into Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who is also beautiful but who, unlike Lauren Julien-Box, has the disadvantage of having to speak a great many lines. She does so with confidence and passion but, because the script conceives Dido as a socially and morally significant historical personage rather than a human being, her lines, and Mbatha-Raw’s performance, lack characterisation and variety.
It’ll be clear enough from the above that Amma Asante and/or Misan Sagay have little interest in ambiguity or complexity of character and the two chief sufferers in the cast are Sam Reid and Tom Felton. Reid plays John Davinier, a parson’s son and, as such, socially despised. John aspires to a career in the law and loves Dido: his earnest rectitude is relentless and monotonous. If it’s not easy to see what Dido sees in him, it’s impossible to understand why Elizabeth Murray has the hots for the Ashfords’ elder son, James: with Tom Felton in the role, he’s an unprepossessing as well as a thoroughly nasty piece of work. Felton oozes clammy viciousness; it’s pretty offensive that his looks are used in this way to signal his moral shortcomings. Sarah Gadon does well enough in the hardly rewarding role of Elizabeth and there’s excellent work from Bethan-Mary James in the small part of a black maid but the best performance from among the younger generation comes from James Norton as the second (and therefore unmoneyed) Ashford son, Oliver. It isn’t just because Oliver Ashford is so different from the psycho rapist and murderer that Norton played, frighteningly, in the recent BBC serial Happy Valley. He impresses in Belle because, unlike his contemporaries in the cast, he suggests to the viewer that what’s going on behind Oliver’s eyes may be rather different from what the world sees and infers from the social exterior of this amiable, naive but somehow troubled young man.
13 June 2014
