 The Governess (1998) Rather than enter into a loveless marriage just for the wealth, she poses as "Mary Blackchurch," a Gentile governess to the very annoying daughter of a relatively loveless couple: a man who is trying to invent a fixative solution that will make photographs permanent, and his bored, pretentious wife who spends the whole movie bitching and moaning about something or other. The film really focuses on Driver and her employer, played by Tom Wilkinson (the older guy from The Full Monty). I have been racking my brain trying to figure out the best joke to use to reveal the fact that Wilkinson's "full monty" (and a substantial weiner it is) is prominently featured and actually plays an important thematic role in The Governess, but I haven't been able to decide, so I'll just move along and say how refreshing it is to see naked pricks being revealed in films these days (actually, you get to see another, even more inspiring boinger as well in The Governess—so much male nudity, so little time to get down to church and thank God). For so long it's been industry standard just to show us as many breasts as possible (I'm not complaining), and I also thank the Lord for the brief glimpses of Minnie Driver's nipples, but I'm just expressing appreciation that nudity is back "in" again, and even bigger and fleshier than ever, with lots of wriggling weenises to balance out the undulating mammaries and deep black bush. Now if only they'd break the boner barrier, we'd be in business! Well, the porno business, at least. Okay, okay, that was just my way of getting around writing too dryly about the boring storyline and to let you know I never take the "erotic film" all that seriously. My theory is that intellectual critics hide behind nudie art films because they'd be mortified to acknowledge they really want to jerk off to the shower scene in Porky's. Anyway, the plot uses the invention of photography as a neat contrivance to show us the invention of nude photography (apparently they went hand in hand—my hand, of course, was clearly "south of the border"), but it doesn't ring false except in a couple of spots (such as when Driver's character virtually immediately suggests to this man that's been working for months on better ways of developing photographs, that he create a darkroom—she also discovers the correct fixative agent by accidentally dropping a boiled egg on a faded photograph). All of this business is basically pretext so the love story can be explored—it's one of those passionate, all-consuming love affairs that brings both parties to outrageous extremes of their personalities—and this part of the film is done exceedingly well and believably. Less well done are some of the characterizations (Wilkinson's ridiculous "romantic poet" archetype of a son, who swoons over Driver pointlessly and delivers overly dramatic dialogue way overdramatically) and the lack of balance between the love plot and the history plot, which seems pretty contrived. I'm not sure why these movies always feel compelled to contextualize their love stories with some supposedly highbrow historical anecdotes, like audiences a) should care about what happened 100 years ago or b) can't enjoy a love story on its own merits. For once, how about just two people having an affair, with neither one having to discover radium, or invent the gyroscope? (I'm referring to the famous movies
Driver is tolerable and Wilkinson is excellent in their portrayals of
these characters, drawn toward each other rather awkwardly by the
screenplay, but executed believably on screen. I was very reluctant to
believe Wilkinson could be a successful leading man, but he is easily the
most impressive element of the film (um, that wasn't a dick joke), and
damn handsome, too. Driver, as usual, is a blend of right and wrong
notes – really, she's not leading lady
caliber, and is better off in movies like Grosse Point Blank or
Big Night
where she can inhabit a smaller character. Here, everything is out on the table (that wasn't a tit
joke), making her character less interesting than it need be. The
rest of the cast is very one-dimensionally drawn and performed, and my
other qualm with the film is that it is too long for the story it's
really telling. The ending is tacked on and unnecessary – in fact,
there's a lot of fat on the film that could have been trimmed to make it
a better movie. But it's pretty engaging throughout, not overly boring
(as I thought it would be), and any movie in which Minnie Driver gets to
say the word "semen" is well worth seeing—not to mention her saying of
semen, "I should like to see it, but not to swallow it." Yowza!
Review by Melle Terrell |