SAVAGE HOUSE***

BARRY LYNDON meets BIG NIGHT in screenwriter Peter Glanz's directorial debut. It starts off as a dark, nasty, witty social satire on social climbers, takes a turn into a genuinely moving love story, but just loses steam in its second half. After such a sharp take-off in its first thirty minutes, I then wanted something, anything to happen, and it never did.  That's the point, but it made for a rather dull watch. This is all rather a shame as the two lead performances are absolutely superb.

The Crown's Claire Foy gives a wonderfully layered performance as Lady Savage - a properly aristocratic woman who defied convention to marry the dastardly rake and parvenu, Chauncey.  She gives a powerful defence of female agency and genuinely moved me.  But despite this, she pawns the last of her family jewels to scrape her way back into high society, when the chance to host the Marlboroughs comes her way.  And what of her husband?  Grant plays Chauncey as a kind of ageing Withnail, fuelled by port and gambling, all charm, wit, petulance and aching vulnerability. He wants to be accepted and also to avoid the bailiffs.  

The movie hits cruising speed fast.  And then stalls.  We get a nice side plot involving Jack Farthing and Bel Powley's valet and woman of all work respectively.  But ultimately this is a morality play about two people hellbent on social climbing and the agents of their own ruin.  It would have worked better as a sixty minute short.

SAVAGE HOUSE is rated R and has a running time of 113 minutes. It is on limited release in the USA and UK.

MARY SHELLEY

In 1816 a young woman called Mary Shelley created the story of Frankenstein - the "monster" created by assembling corpses and revivifying them with electricity.  It's a story of an innocent, faithful creature misused by the real monster, Doctor Frankstein. The monster is violent and vengeful but also displays more humanity than his creator.  The woman who created this story was not just sensitive and romantic with a capital R, but deeply intelligent, well-read in the classics, fascinated by science - an active participant in the political and philosophical debates of the day. Her reputation as a radical philosopher may not be in the same league as that of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, but her fictional creation has achieved more fame, and argued more powerfully for the radical cause. And yet history has diminished her - describing her more often as the scandalous girl seduced by Percy Bysshe Shelley, keeper of his artistic legacy, and almost by chance creator of a gothic masterpiece. Only very recently has she been subject to serious intellectual enquiry. And in this film I had hoped to see a similarly respectful portrayal of this radical woman.

The film is okay as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far or deep enough. It is very good at portraying Mary as a naive silly little girl who falls for a charming but vain and capricious seducer.  But it makes a fateful and disrespectful error in portraying her as being extremely passive. She watches and observes as men show her things - articles of galvanism or gothic paintings - which will work their way into her famous book.  But nowhere does it show Mary to be an active agent in her intellectual life.  There's nowhere that we SEE Mary as interested in science. We're just told by a bunch of male characters that she is.  The result is a heroine that is admirably free of cant, but one that is frustratingly passive. And it becomes very difficult to understand why she keeps returning to her emotionally abusive husband because he too is a pretty face. If there's no credible intellectual spark between the too, what's there to engage with?

That said the film is occasionally worth watching for the odd engaging performance - Tom Sturridge gets Byron exactly right.  But dialogue that is occasionally anachronistic, too conscious of the #timesup movement, and lead characters who are too thinly drawn, undermine the entire project. 

MARY SHELLEY has a running time of 120 minutes.  The film is available to rent and own.

A ROYAL NIGHT OUT

This year sees the anniversary or many a military event, not least the Battle of Waterloo which I am covering in real time with my @relivewaterloo twitter account. One of those anniversaries is the 70th anniversary of VE or Victory in Europe day. Many of us have grown up with iconic images of that night - the crowds partying in Trafalgar Square and the Mall.  Set against that backdrop, this movie - A ROYAL NIGHT OUT - is a very mild and respectful depiction of what might have happened if Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret had been given permission to celebrate VE Day among the masses.  The movie sees them beg permission of their parents, then hit the Ritz where Princess Margaret (true to later reform) manages to give her chaperones the slip and have a fine old time everywhere from the Ritz to a Soho brothel to the Chelsea Barracks. Meanwhile, her earnest elder sister, Princess Elizabeth tries to track her down with the reluctant help of working class airman Jack.