Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled is ostensibly a re-adaptation of Thomas Cullinan's 1966 novel, which is written from the perspective of the three women (one a slave) and five girls at the Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies in Virginia. Coppola's version is an obvious attempt to reorient the story around some nebulous "female perspective," which is evident even if you haven't read her comments on the film.
Colin Farrell plays Union corporal John McBurney, who is discovered lying helpless in the woods outside Farnsworth Seminary by young Amy (Oona Laurence). She helps him hobble to the school, where the occupants — headmistress Martha (Nicole Kidman), schoolteacher Edwina (Kirsten Dunst), and the girls, who include Alicia (Elle Fanning) and Jane (Angourie Rice) — carry him inside.
Martha extracts the shrapnel from McBurney's leg and sews it up, leaving him to heal. The obvious question is whether to let him stay until he's healed or kick him out to fend for himself; only one girl expresses any real opposition. The matter is settled smoothly, and this perplexing ease lubricates the entire film. There is no tension to speak of, nor any sexual heat, or any tangled character motivations. The school's slave Hallie, a crucial character in both the novel and Siegel's 1971 film, is nowhere to be found; the dynamic between Hallie and McBurney added a broader dimension to the story, tying it directly to slavery.
Coppola's Beguiled attempts to omit slavery entirely, which is the repugnant negative space at the heart of the film. Imagine choosing to set a film in the antebellum South because it was beautiful, as Coppola says in this fawning Entertainment Weekly piece. One line at the start of the film tells us the slaves are gone, and from there it's a blindingly white affair; literally so, as Anne Ross's production design is a study in shades of ivory. White walls; white furniture; white dresses; white skin. If the film was confrontational at all, you might think it was daring you to empathize with slaveowners. It is not confrontational. It is aestheticized and abstract, a sickly-sweet dollhouse fantasy photographed in fashionably outdated 1.66:1 on nauseatingly lush 35mm by Philippe Le Sourd (The Grandmaster).
The war is marked only by the distant booming of cannons. McBurney is no longer an aggressive macho caricature, and he's no proud soldier. Farrell plays him sincere and respectful until he's simply not — at which point Coppola turns him into a raging Irish drunk. Her lackadaisical approach to space and time benefits the film's early going; it feels palpably heat-choked and bleary. But when the story demands clarity, Coppola's direction and Sarah Flack's editing don't deliver. In one sequence McBurney, on crutches, appears to teleport around the school's grounds like Jason Voorhees while everyone else follows at normal speed.
There's simply nothing here. Coppola and company are play the lurid material entirely straight, and ironically by trimming away the excesses it becomes even more confused and hateful. The cast struggles to give Coppola's nuance-free writing any interiority, any life. Characters simply do what the scene dictates. The film's big rupturing event, where McBurney takes a tumble down a Freudian staircase, is a car crash of unclear motivations, as if the actors were working off different drafts of the script. The net result is that three women are jealous of each other's relationships with a single man and resort to violence; the same as in Siegel's film, but a lot less fun.
This is a hermetic, myopic, and shallow version of the world, where delicate white ciswomen are the only people who matter. As it happens, The Beguiled offers a tidy metaphor for white Southern women's complicity in slavery; sealed up in a plantation house amid gnarled woods dripping with Spanish moss, putting on unshakable airs, upholding their self-serving gentility no matter the horror around them. The film calls that strength. History is not so kind.
Zach Budgor writes about movies and video games on the internet. Follow him on Twitter.
This article appears in Jun 22-29, 2017.