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The More Things Change …The Governess and Your Friends & Neighbors are separated by years but not by sensibility.by Hadley Hury
One result of our expanded appreciation of this era has been the discovery, much to our post-modern surprise, of numerous parallels and analogues to our own. Not unlike America and other western world powers today, Great Britain in the Age of Victoria was assailed from without and within by radical shifts in geopolitics, economics, and scientific thought and spirituality. It had to come to grips with the loss of an empire and the effects of the Industrial Revolution much as our own era has been forced to grapple with fanatical religious terrorism and the onslaught of information-age cybernetics. Along with all the thoughtful artistic considerations of the Victorians as, in many ways, the immediate prototypes (the shock absorbers, as it were) of the major tensions of our own times, has also come the inevitable glut of trivializing trash. With the indiscriminate, late-20th-century, prurience that it is our shame to bear, there has of late arisen a popular sub-genre in movies produced for both the big screen and television that at best might be termed bodice-ripper and at worst a sniggering, tedious, insistence on blowing up the heretofore supposedly straight-laced skirt of the Victorian Age. (A couple of last season’s television offerings – even on the usually sober Arts & Entertainment network – seemed to have been scripted by the same folks whose paperbacks fill the racks at major drugstore chains.) The Governess has just enough intelligence to interest discerning viewers and just enough black-bombazined sexual tension to enthrall all but the most insensate DNA analysts. It also has going for it a deft and galvanizing central performance by Minnie Driver (Good Will Hunting). Her particular talents and her exotic facial features are perfectly suited to this story of a bright and spirited young woman from London who, when her father’s unexpected death leaves her family impoverished, takes an assignment as governess at a remote estate in Scotland. A Jewess, she has grown up keenly aware of her minority status in English society; she has been sheltered only by her father’s mercantile success. Without that buffer – and unable, after his death, to accept an offer of marriage from a wealthy young Jew whom she does not love – Rosina signs on for her engagement deep inside Calvinist Scotland as Mary Blackchurch, a Christian. If much of its Gothic ground seems over-tilled, Goldbacher’s script nonetheless brings a couple of good ideas into play. As Mary/Rosina falls in love with the lord of the manor, Goldbacher layers the film’s basic concept of identity and self-discovery to include the Victorian, pre-psychology sense of “otherness” in sexuality, in changing gender roles, and in the struggle between scientific advancement and art. Tom Wilkinson (The Full Monty) is excellent as Mr. Cavendish, the Scottish laird who with Mary’s help makes a major breakthrough in his experiments with the emerging art of photography. At first smitten with Mary’s intelligence, then her independence, and finally her sexuality, Cavendish refracts the doubt-ridden intellectual and sensual passions of his times and serves, by the film’s end, as Goldbacher’s foil to the film’s discreetly retrospective feminist tone. (Mary/Rosina might almost be a more liberated Dorothea in Eliot’s Middlemarch.) Wilkinson avoids cliche and brings Cavendish to rounded, full-bodied life, sympathetic even at his most despicable.
The film is too long, sometimes tediously paced, and Goldbacher’s original ideas never quite balance the load of premises, concepts, and metaphors borrowed from all those other Victorian melodramas. It’s not difficult, however, to see what drew Driver to the role of Mary/Rosina; its potentialities transcend those of the film as a whole and it is how masterfully she realizes them that most directly attributes to what accomplishment The Governess may claim. Neil LaBute’s Your Friends & Neighbors is a bitter, bleak comedy that reminds us just how far we’ve come with sexual mores since psychology raised its Hydra head and the Victorian Age came uncorseted – and it’s not a pretty picture. The writer-director’s debut film, In the Company of Men, was a discomforting essay on contemporary misogyny; Your Friends & Neighbors is a stylized view of amorality among young adult professionals. The characters are between 30 and 40; they hit puberty either along with the sexual revolution or in its liberated aftermath and, immediately thereafter, left college with the specter of AIDS looking over their shoulders. Joyless and watchful in their relationships, as if playing championship chess, they are a generation concerned with love as commodity, not capacity, and less with discovery than with controlled consequences. Pristinely self-involved, they are the poster people for the Information Age. They don’t communicate, they don’t know how (and besides, communication actually requires listening to the other person); they manipulate data. The problems among the couples in Friends arise variously, but all have in common that the characters become baffled with efforts to adjust (or to have adjusted) projected images, either a partner’s or his own. Their deepest emotion seems to be something between irritation and perplexity over manifestations of the messy human factor, impatient bewilderment when hitting the Escape key doesn’t cleanly dispatch someone or double-stroking Control-Alternate doesn’t bring up a new screen with which to amuse oneself. LaBute does a good job of heightening the characters’ almost deadly low-affect cool by framing the film as comedy. The scenes are short, tightly constructed; the dialogue is somewhat Mametian, the satire as earnest as Woody Allen’s but more brutal. “Good? Am I good?” answers one of the characters incredulously when his friend dares even to touch on a moral consideration. “What kind of question is that?” The closed-frame shooting of Your Friends
& Neighbors is theatrical; scenes primarily occur as if on a proscenium stage. The
technique reinforces the hip artifice of LaBute’s tone, helps ameliorate the
film’s chief weakness – a certain thinness in development – and keeps the
soullessness of the characters from wholly alienating the viewer. It also places great
responsibility on the actors to bring the axe-blade of this vicious script down right on
the very fine line between credible human drama and deeply ironic, existential, comedy.
Handling the task admirably are Jason Patric, Nastassja Kinski, Amy Brenneman, Aaron
Eckhart, Ben Stiller, and Catherine Keener. |
riter-director
Sandra Goldbacher’s The Governess is the latest entry in the craze for titillated
retrospection into every crannied nook of the Victorian sensibility. In recent decades,
historians and literary critics have cast new light on the second half of the 19th century
and brought it into sharper focus. Filmmakers, not far behind, broke with the industry
precedent of sanitized romance (say, the 1939 Wuthering Heights) and cartoonish melodrama
(treatments of Dickens in the 1930s and ’40s) as they began to put a more
naturalistic face on the conflicted heroes and heroines of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.
From John Schlesinger’s Far From the Madding Crowd in 1967 to last year’s Jude
the Obscure and Mrs. Brown, our anima mundi has been newly populated by century-old people
more like ourselves than the grotesque stone statues, unreal and bloodless, we had once,
patronizingly, imagined them to be. 
