Movies into Film
Le Divorce
Directed by James Ivory
USA, 2003
LE BOMB
Of the numerous grenades I might conceivably lob at the shoddy Le Divorce, chief among them would go to the wretched cinematography and makeup that turn the lovely Stockard Channing into a large, frumpy feline. Besieged by smeary rouge, a whiskery countenance, and a camera hostile to older actresses, Ms. Channing sadly suggests that Ouisa Kittredge, after these many years, has indeed found herself in a movie version of Cats.
Stockard Channing in Le Divorce (Photo: Fox Searchlight)
I concede that I had looked forward to Le Divorce. While I haven’t read the Diane Johnson novel from which the movie births itself, the film promised by its Parisian setting and stellar cast to be good fluff. Never mind the execrable track record of director James Ivory and his wrong-hand woman, the emotionally tone-deaf scenarist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. It looked, for once, as if the bubbles in a glass of champagne might carry the day. Yet the duo that robbed the comedy from Forster’s Howards End could hardly be the pair to trust with froth.
Americans in Paris…could the timing be any better in the international sideshow known as U.S.-France diplomatic relations? The political undercurrents in Le Divorce, however, are muffled. For instance, Isabel Walker (played by Kate Hudson), fresh from California, begins an affair with a grimy, foofy-haired proletariat of the Leftish persuasion. For reasons Isabel and the filmmakers keep close to themselves (provided that even they knew) she concurrently becomes the mistress of a well-heeled Frenchman who (consistently for a right-winger) adores dropping bombs on other countries and adamantly opposes abortion. Why does Isabel do this? Is she undercover (literally, figuratively)? Is she experiencing a sincere political conversion? Is she schizophrenic? Ivory and Jhabvala lend no insight or even much interest into Isabel’s crossing party lines, and Hudson looks too strappingly mature to play Isabel as a case of arrested development.
Elsewhere, Stephen Fry comes through with a delectable cameo as a France-bashing British art collector, and Naomi Watts, save an unconvincing, unprepared for suicide attempt that seems entirely out of character, outshines her material most of the way. – NPT
August 2003
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com