Tamara Drewe

| 13 Aug 2014 | 07:01

    Tamara Drewe

    Directed by Stephen Frears

    Runtime: 111 min.

    Tamara Drewe is one of Stephen Frears’ deadlies—like his awful 2002 Liam—where his proven skill with actors doesn’t overcome a dumb concept. This is an adaptation of the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds that updates Thomas Hardy characters and plotting into a contemporary satire of literary life in the age of rabid pop culture influence.

    Tamara is a young woman with literary ambitions and irresistible sexual allure, who causes havoc in the writers colony that is her ancestral home and where outsiders come to retreat. Tamara is a homegrown exotic like Hardy’s Eustacia Vye or Bathsheba Everdene; dark-haired Gemma Arterton’s lush sensuality (like the young Jennifer Jones) fits the bill but dulls the show. Something is lost when Frears-through-Simmonds reduces Hardy’s opulent style to satire. Hardy wrote dramatic, cosmic narratives intended to produce great emotional effect while powerfully commenting on fate. This graphic-novel facetiousness (and Frears’ inept attempts at split screen) belittles the great emotions one wants to feel from the story of people whose crisscrossed desires leave them in unforeseeable circumstances.

    A writer’s comment—“Thieves and liars, that’s what authors are”—is meant to be ironic, but irony is a paltry thing next to Hardy’s insight. John Fowles knew better when he modernized Hardy in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, yet Simmonds’ sarcasm is beyond Frears’ sensibility. Besides, the peccadilloes and conceits of the literary class were already, perhaps definitively, spoofed in Jared Hess’s Gentlemen Broncos. By rights, Simmonds should have used the teenage mischief-maker Jail-bait Jody (Jessica Barden) as the focus of her Hardyesque preoccupation, creating a genuinely millennial femme fatale like that in Scott Pilgrim. Combining the comic and the cosmic doesn’t work in Tamara Drewe; when the plot complications are summarized with, “It’s an accident,” Frears misses the dramatic emphasis necessary to give such a summary Hardy’s profundity.