Worth: $4.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Rachel Weisz, Sam Claflin, Iain Glen, Holliday Grainger
Intro:
...it's been 65 years between cinematic adaptations of My Cousin Rachel. Could be there's a good reason for that.
After his cousin and benefactor, Ambrose, dies in Italy, young Philip (Sam Claflin) is quite put out at the prospect of his widow, the titular Rachel (Rachel Weisz) coming to stay at the Cornwall manor he is now de facto lord over. He soon changes his tune because, well, it’s Rachel Weisz, but questions still hang over Ambrose’s death. Did he die of a brain tumour, as the death certificate states, or was he slowly poisoned by Rachel as his fevered letters suggest? Add to that the question of inheritance, with the now-besotted Philip determining to hand over Ambrose’s estate to the bereaved Rachel, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a delirious post-Gothic melodrama.
The thing is, you don’t just pile those ingredients up, you have to cook them and, to push the metaphor about as far as it will go, writer and director Roger Michell is a poor chef. In adapting Daphne du Maurier’s 1951 potboiler of the same name, Michell forgoes the essential element in transposing this kind of thing to the screen for a modern audience: tonal control. All those repressed desires and simmering tensions beneath the starched collars, the stolen glances across candlelit drawing rooms, start to seem pretty silly if they’re not handled deftly. And My Cousin Rachel is a very silly film. Sadly, it’s almost certain it doesn’t mean to be.
Poor Sam Claflin does what he can with the character of Philip, a spoilt man-baby who is either flouncing about being put out that Rachel is inserting herself into his No Girls Allowed country clubhouse, or else thirstily trying to insert himself in her once he gets a good look at her. His arc is unbelievably cartoonish, going from pining for the blatantly homoerotic relationship with his uncle in the opening scenes (a thread which is never picked up on again), to a willfully reckless hound dog in the back end, willing to throw everything away for the affections of his widowed house guest. It’s a path that might be convincingly followed on the page, but seems to be beyond the capabilities of any involved to evoke onscreen.
The ever-capable Weisz fares much better, but we are deliberately kept ignorant of her interior life, revelations about her actions and motives being key to the film’s climax. Of course, that means we’re left with Philip as our POV character, which becomes a case of the blind leading the bored. Still, we’re basically asked to stare at Weisz for long stretches of time to try and parse her intentions, and if that’s your thing, there’ll be something to enjoy here.
What’s particularly frustrating about My Cousin Rachel is the sense that there’s a good film to be mined from this material. The basic bones of the narrative take some of the more problematic elements of Gothic and Victorian literature – an uneasy sense of place, a mistrust of female sexuality and power, xenophobia bordering on outright racism, and some funny ideas about keeping it all in the family – and subverts a lot of it, but Michell fails to emphasise the right beats in a way that makes those themes hit home. What we’re left with is some really nice cinematography by Mike Eley (there are killer compositions here, to be fair), an increasingly annoying musical cue by Rael Jones (an earworm you’ll want to poison), and talented performers struggling to do their best.
Incidentally, it’s been 65 years between cinematic adaptations of My Cousin Rachel. Could be there’s a good reason for that.
Enjoyable review!