Roger Michell (2017)
The storyline is (according to Wikipedia) faithful to Daphne du Maurier’s novel, except that the title character now meets her death more spectacularly. In the book and the film that quickly followed its publication in 1951, a footbridge over the sunken garden in construction on the Cornish estate that Rachel now owns gives way[1]. In Roger Michell’s adaptation, Rachel (Rachel Weisz), wearing a brilliant blue gown and riding a white horse, plunges with her mount from a dodgy cliff path to the seashore far below. Not unexpectedly, this new film differs from its predecessor by including a bit of sex and exposed flesh, and a few swear words but Michell, who also wrote the screenplay, shows little interest in reworking du Maurier’s romantic melodrama more thoroughly than that. He relies on visual clichés when it suits: the pearls of a necklace scattering and skittering down a wooden staircase; chaotic rifling through a chest of drawers in a desperate search for incriminating evidence. The mood of the film isn’t greatly varied; occasionally, this results in a pivotal moment lacking the impact you feel it should have – for example, when Rachel reveals to the hero Philip Ashley (Sam Claflin) that his cousin Ambrose left a will, bequeathing everything to her but crucially unsigned). The perils of the cliff path are prefigured in a sequence that is both clumsily placed and makes you wonder why the route isn’t more locally notorious than it turns out be. It’s not clear why My Cousin Rachel has been remade at all, except that it’s sixty-five years now since the Hollywood version. (There’ve been television, radio and stage adaptations in between.) Roger Michell’s film lacks excitement as well as imaginative purpose but it is entertaining and well acted.
Although Daphne du Maurier’s plot seems designed to ensure that Rachel’s every action has both a malicious and an innocent explanation so that the truth about her is finally elusive, I was, as with Henry Koster’s movie, left unconvinced by one or two aspects of this. One theme that comes through more strongly in Michell’s version is the significance of the age difference between Rachel and Philip, who is besotted with her. The casting helps for a start: Rachel Weisz is sixteen years older than Sam Claflin whereas Richard Burton was only nine years Olivia de Havilland’s junior. Here, Rachel gives the disparity of their ages as a reason she can’t marry Philip. The Oedipal implication of their relationship comes through interestingly in Philip’s impatient determination for Rachel to inherit the family jewels, in particular the pearls last worn by his mother on her wedding day. Philip was so young when his mother died that he has no memory of her. In that sense, he’s in a wholly different position from du Maurier’s Max de Winter yet, when Rachel first wears the pearls, the appropriation of costume belonging to a dead woman who exerts influence beyond the grave echoes Rebecca.
Rachel Weisz’s impenetrability (I sometimes think watching her: this woman is evidently feeling something but what?) serves her very well here. Weisz is convincingly ambiguous and enigmatic, as well as very beautiful. Her portrait of Rachel is as successful as Olivia de Havilland’s was not. Philip Ashley’s complete sexual inexperience is one of the more contrived features of Daphne du Maurier’s set-up but Sam Claflin does a good job of making Philip plausibly naïve. Claflin isn’t the most fluid of actors but his hard work pays off. His playing is always committed rather than compelling but he persuades you that Philip is in the grip of an obsession. Holliday Grainger does well in the thankless role of Louise, the daughter of Philip’s godfather-guardian. Louise’s love for the hero is unreciprocated for as long as Rachel lives: even at the end, when she’s dead, an uneasy shadow of second-bestness hangs over Louise. (She’s now Philip’s first bride yet she’s the second Mrs Ashley.) Iain Glen is Louise’s father and Pierfranceso Favino is Rainaldi, Rachel’s hard-to-read Italian friend. Given what he has to work with, Simon Russell Beale plays the Ashley family solicitor with an emotional precision and incision that are quite amazing.
14 June 2017
