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Monday, July 31, 2017
MOVIE REVIEW/The Beguiled (2017)
Mythical Southern White Womanhood Abdicates Its Pedestal In Civil
War Virginia, 1864
Nicole
Kidman (center) as Miss Martha heads Farnsworth Seminary in 1864 Virginia in
Sofia Coppola's edition of "The Beguiled".
Focus
Features
by
Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com
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Monday,
July 31,
2017
Note: "The Beguiled" opened on
June 30 across the U.S. and Canada and continues to play in numerous theaters in
both countries.
The overt politics of race and sex in Don Siegel's raw, somewhat campy "The
Beguiled" of 1971 are stripped from Sofia Coppola's genteel, polite 2017
edition, as "all the slaves have gone", a character says initially to seriously
injured Union Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell). Mr. Farrell is more
doe-eyed Bambi to Clint Eastwood's beyond-the-boundaries Dirty Harry-like
McBurney. His character's lowly bedraggled presence makes Ms. Coppola's
thriller as subtle, stark and as devastating as her stunning omission of Black people
in the South in 1864 Civil War Virginia, where Ms. Coppola's film, based on Mr.
Siegel's, is centered.
The white ladies and girls of Farnsworth Seminary scorn McBurney before
sexual tension, lust and longing submerge their hostilities. "I was
talking to the Colonel privately," says one, when caught leaning over his bed by
a more senior Seminary member. None are immune to the man in their lair.
Each of the women
and girls is different. Some seek power. Others genuine love. Others a
father figure. Others affection. Still others attention.
The womens' pent-up desires are suppressed anger to being long oppressed by men,
specifically Southern white men. It is way too simplistic to say that the
cloistered women are merely starved for sex. The women kill McBurney with lust
and compete for his affections but it
all feels like desperate rage. (The women are really competing with each
other for power.) Some of the women's use of the word "enemy"
refers more to McBurney being male than being a Union soldier. These
Seminary women are castoffs. They yearn for escape. They have been
scarred, indoctrinated and dominated by men -- imprisoned by them. An
exquisite lingering shot by Ms. Coppola epitomizes the women's imprisonment and lack of freedom.
McBurney, a rogue and
scoundrel who plays the women against each other and deceives them in his
visions of a ready-made harem, is more free
in demise than the women are in life.
The projections and metaphors of Ms. Coppola's well-made drama scream in stereo.
After McBurney loses a limb you may be inclined to think his manhood has gone.
But the sexist opportunist McBurney plays on the myth of Southern white
womanhood and its gentility, exploits all he can from it, yet is horrified when monstrous women who are anything but
professed Christians strike back with a
vengeance. McBurney, wounded less by the Confederates, uses sexist
expectations to assume the comfort of female strangers. He is naive.
Another war is really going on. None of the players on
Ms. Coppola's stage are innocent -- and the airbrushing of enslaved Blacks on this
canvas is a huge problem.
Nicole Kidman personnifies icy power and envy as Miss Martha, a role Geraldine
Page memorialized so well in 1971 -- a character that belongs with the
malevolence against men that Louise Fletcher's Nurse Ratched character
personnified two years later in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest". Ms.
Kidman's Martha wants sexual satisfaction from McBurney but it is power she truly
wants. Sex is only a small part of that power. When the women
Miss Martha has power over deny her, she reasserts power over them by getting to
McBurney. Her act, not in good faith, is as close to a "rape" of McBurney -- a
permanent disfiguring without consent -- that "The Beguiled" comes to.
Mr. Farrell -- he may be characterized by some as of the "Black Irish" persusasion --
may be the closest metaphor to a Black man or woman in "The Beguiled". His
McBurney is a synonym template for the very lust some Southern white women had
for enslaved
Black men in the pre-1800s and beyond. Those particular women would long
to have sex with their enslaved men. Woe betide those Black men if they
refused to comply. Refusal meant their lives. Once those women lied to
their husbands that the enslaved Black man raped them, only one thing followed.
Because of the absence of Black people in "The Beguiled" this point looms ever
larger.
Not completely unlike Chris in "Get Out", Jordan Peele's ingenious 2017 horror
film set in the forestry of Alabama, McBurney is brought to the Seminary, ogled
and feasted upon before being taken apart by the greed and objectification of
white vultures. Those iron gates of the Seminary that has locked these
women far away from the world around them may as well be gates at a zoo designed
by men to suppress women. All that is missing from the gates is a sign
that reads, "DANGER: DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS."
"The Beguiled" is about the female quelling of male dominance over women. As the men do the
fighting the women do the plotting. The women plot against Confederate
Southern men. Ammunition is requested from one soldier for a possible future rebellion.
Deceit accompanies the request. The prim and proper Seminary ladies plot
against Union men. In Sofia Coppola's film of gender war you don't need a man to get ahead if you are a woman.
You must vanquish or emasculate him to be free and independent -- and that comes at a
price.
Also with: Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, Oona Laurence, Addison Riecke, Angourie
Rice, Emma Howard, Wayne Pere.
"The Beguiled" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for some
sexuality. There is also some mild (or not so mild) gore. The film's
running time is one hour and 34 minutes.
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