There's also the fact that James spends most of the film on the perpetual verge of tears, while Hammer can't seem to muster Maxim's vaunted rage, which is so frequently referenced in the script, but never manages to make it to the screen. Not only does it supply James' character with a final triumphant moment in her conflict with Danvers (galling! sacrilege!), it tacks on an ending which completely refutes the story's central, intriguing darkness. Theirs is less a relationship than a pathology, but the Netflix film envisions it as a romance that is destined to be happy, once all those pesky long-buried secrets come to light. de Winter and her husband - he is much older, sneeringly condescending, and even cruel, where she is fearful, unsure and subservient. In both the novel and the 1940 film, there is a great, yawning distance between the second Mrs. When 2020 Danvers goes round that final bend, I wasn't necessarily on board with her.īut what's most mystifying is how thoroughly Wheatley's film seems to have misread the ostensible "romance" between James' character and Hammer's Maxim. It must be said, however, that by starting the film in such a relatively grounded place, the journey Thomas is tasked with taking proves a much longer walk than Anderson's was, as the 1940 Danvers was pretty clearly off, from the jump. Her Danvers isn't nearly as outsized as Anderson's, but her choices are just as smart and specific. That scene isn't doing the work it's meant to, but you know who is? Kristin Scott Thomas, is who. Where Hitchcock used simple shadow and light to drive home Fontaine's alienation and isolation, director Ben Wheatley stages a ham-fisted scene at a masquerade ball to literalize James' character's mental breakdown. Instead, the film shunts off all of its swooniness to its direction, using dream sequences filled with overwrought special effects to establish James' character's disorientation. Anti-subtext, anti-horny, anti-swoon - at least in the performances, which are dialed back in a manner that renders them more realistic, yet far less interesting. ![]() The new Netflix film, on the other hand, is anti. (The scene in which Danvers gently strokes the narrator's (Joan Fontaine) cheek with the sleeve of a mink coat has single-handedly launched a thousand queer media studies theses.) Anderson is unforgettable, largely because she appears to be doing so little while serving you so much - she remains unnervingly still, expressionless and unblinking from scene to scene, yet manages to radiate menace. Danvers, the performance that defines the movie. There's the exquisitely cast George Sanders, so oily that just standing in his presence provides a full-day's dose of omega-3s, as Rebecca's cousin in his brief screen time manages to prove both a cad, and a bounder.Īnd there is, of course, Judith Anderson as Mrs. There's the great Florence Bates as the narrator's employer, the perfectly named Edythe Van Hopper, a grand dame with a performative quaver in her voice that she can swap out on the fly for a low, appraising growl. "Swoony" being the key word here, because that's a polite, Hays-Code-appropriate way of saying "horny." Rebecca (1940) is a strikingly horny movie, filled with characters breathlessly panting after one another, and doing so in the slightly heightened, stylized, larger-than-life performance style of the era. The thing that stays with you about the 1940 film is how enthusiastically it steers into the swoony gothic mystery of it all. ![]() But it's also inevitable, because what the filmmakers have produced is not a fresh reimagining, but a dully dutiful remake. Let's acknowledge: It is wildly unfair to compare this knock-off to Hitchcock's iconic classic, which, not for nothing, won the Academy Award for best picture. I decided to re-watch the 1940 Hitchcock film the day before watching the Netflix version, which was, by any measure, a huge mistake. That's the end of the review for folks who are coming to this story fresh.
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