Stephen Frears (2010)

Tamara Drewe is pretty enjoyable, in spite of a lot.  Moira Buffini’s screenplay is adapted from a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds.  The graphic novel’s source was Simmonds’ comic strip for The Guardian and the origins show in the screenplay.  There is a storyline but the first part of the film is weakly episodic and although Alexandre Desplat’s music suggests an accumulating comedy-mystery Stephen Frears doesn’t get much momentum going.  The two deaths that occur in the closing stages – of one of the main characters and another one’s dog – are incongruous with the dramatic proportions of the story and jarring.  Even if you quickly get (I didn’t) that this is a comic reworking of Far from the Madding Crowd, the setting – a fictional Dorset village called Ewedown – and moral satire are so modern they don’t ring a Thomas Hardy bell of any tone.  The rural settings, lit by Ben Davis, are lovely:  there’s next to nothing ominous or implacable about the landscape.

The beautiful Tamara Drewe, who left the village to get a life and a transforming nose job, is now a successful journalist in London.  She returns to Ewedown to do up and sell a house owned by her late mother.  Andy Cobb, whose family worked the land for generations but were swindled out of the property by Tamara’s, has fallen on economically hard times and barely makes a living as a handyman.  These two went out together as teenagers, in spite of Tamara’s beak, and it’s clear that Andy still carries a torch for her but she falls for Ben Sergeant, a charismatic jerk who’s the drummer in a high-profile rock band.  Ben is Troy, right down to the Sergeant (it’s his dog that takes the bullet that the man took in Hardy).  Tamara is obviously Bathsheba Everdene.  Andy is Gabriel Oak, although there’s no suggestion in their happy ending together that he’s second best as far as Tamara is concerned.  It’s less clear that Farmer Boldwood has any equivalent in the story.  Surely not the vile local celebrity Nicholas Hardiment, a serial adulterer and writer of best-selling crime fiction, who lusts after Tamara; nor Glen McCreavy, an awkwardly wry American academic, on a sabbatical to write a Hardy biography and finding inspiration at the Ewedown writers’ retreat run by Nicholas – or, at least, by his long-suffering wife Beth, to whom Glen is increasingly attracted.   Glen talks a good deal to Beth about Hardy’s own marital problems and infidelity.  That resonates with Beth of course but she doesn’t chime with any character in Far from the Madding Crowd.

I’m not suggesting that Posy Simmonds was under any obligation to translate Hardy’s novel in scrupulous detail but the tonelessness of the film may owe something to the half-heartedness of the source material – and the plotting is sloppy even for something with no pretence to realism.   A local schoolgirl called Jody is crazy about Ben; her friend Casey is Andy’s niece; they know Tamara leaves a front door key under the mat for Andy to let himself in when he comes to do painting and decorating.  There isn’t a good reason, once they’ve seen Ben going in and out of Tamara’s house, for the girls not to trespass sooner than they do; or for why, later on, since they keep watch on the place in the hope of a glimpse of Ben, it takes them so long to realise that Nicholas is visiting for sessions with Tamara.  There’s no suggestion that Stephen Frears and Moira Buffini are aware of the lameness of this plotting or want to make comic mileage out of it.   Tamara Drewe could be a lot sharper if the film-makers were more knowing in this respect and if the comedy was consistently, robustly black.

Still, Frears is a very good director of actors and, although the performances don’t all fit one with another, everyone in the cast is worth watching.  Roger Allam, with his relaxed, searing wit, is excellent as the libidinous, lavishly selfish Nicholas and Tamsin Greig is funny and touching as Beth.  As her suitor Glen, Bill Camp describes with painful accuracy a man whose acute awareness of his social clumsiness helps make it worse.  As the title character, Gemma Arterton looks great even if she’s a shade too self-aware and not quite likeable enough for you to warm to Tamara, for all her fickleness.  As Ben, Dominic Cooper is a cartoon – his playing and Tamsin Greig’s especially don’t belong in the same film – but he’s very effective at that level.  Jessica Barden (cast as Liddy in the forthcoming Thomas Vinterberg remake of Far from the Madding Crowd) is exuberant if a bit over-eager as Jody; Charlotte Christie’s Casey is a nice foil.   Susan Wooldridge is splendid in a cameo as a county local, avid for Nicholas Hardiment’s books and indeed for the author himself.  On the whole, the actors embody their characters very well – none more so than Luke Evans as Andy Cobb.  I’d not seen Evans before the two-part BBC drama about the Great Train Robbery just before Christmas.   I was struck again here by his surprisingly inexpressive, almost constricted voice – surprisingly because Evans first broke through in stage musicals.  He’s a strong physical presence, though, and – both as Bruce Reynolds in The Great Train Robbery and in Tamara Drewe – emotionally convincing.

13 January 2014