Susan Granger’s review of “Madame Bovary” (Alchemy)
Can someone please tell me why moviegoers needed yet another remake of Gustave Flaubert’s classic 19th century novel? It’s already been filmed by Jean Renoir, Gustave Chabrol and Vincente Minnelli.
In Sophie Barthes’ new version, Mia Wasikowska plays the ambitious wife of a country doctor who swallows arsenic before the audience realizes what has inspired her suicide. That’s told in flashbacks.
Having finished her convent education, young Emma is immediately betrothed to Charles Bovary (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), a tediously dull, provincial doctor in a rural Normandy village. While she tries to be a dutiful wife, social-climbing Emma is the original dissatisfied, desperate housewife.
Seeking amorous adventure, she impulsively engages in consecutive adulterous affairs. The first is with wealthy nobleman Marquis D’Andervilliers (Logan Marshal-Green), then with Leon (Ezra Miller), a law clerk and former neighbor.
While the pharmacist, Monsieur Homais (Paul Giamatti), is pompous, the sleaziest of all is the sly merchant, Monsieur Lheureaux (Rhys Ifans), who sells shopaholic Emma extravagant dresses on credit and then humiliates her when she attempts to prostitute herself to pay for her purchases.
Collaborating with co-writer Felipe Marino, writer/director Sophie Barthes (“Cold Souls”) delves into gloomy atmospheric details – like the doctor’s description of bleeding and lancing his patients and operating on a club foot without anesthesia.
Filmed in English and shot in Belgium, the result is visually arresting, chronicling a time when women were virtually trapped – because they couldn’t work and couldn’t divorce. Emma is a victim of this era.
But delicate, then 23-year-old Ms. Wasikowska (“Alice in Wonderland,” “Jane Eyre”) seems too immature and lacking in the essential, pervasive sexuality that drives flawed-but-fascinating Emma Bovary.
For American audiences, Vincent Minnelli’s 1949 version, starring Jennifer Jones, remains far more effective, particularly since he frames it with the trial of Gustave Flaubert (James Mason) for publishing obscenity. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” Flaubert said in his defense.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Madame Bovary” is a superficially faithful 5 – and quickly forgettable.
