An average movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since I have a weak spot for Dakota Fanning, I thought I might as well check it out. To be honest, I didn’t know at all what it was about before watching this movie and it turned out to be a rather dreary costume drama about a loveless marriage. It’s only afterwards that I discovered that the damned thing had been written by Emma Thompson which might explain why she was displayed on all the promotional material even though she had a rather small part. Well, even though Thompson had managed to win an Academy Award for her screenplay for ‘Sense and Sensibility’, she hasn’t exactly been productive as a writer afterwards and, above all, she never wrote anything really worthwhile. Indeed, ‘Nanny McPhee’ was a rather shameless Mary Poppins copycat and, in this case, it seems that she got heavily inspired by ‘Madame Bovary’. In fact, it was actually based on a true story but, to be honest, I just didn’t care much about the damned thing. The basic idea was to show how awful it was for Effie Gray that she ended up in such a loveless marriage but, to be honest, her situation was hardly exceptional as most marriages were not based on love back then. In this case, they tried to argue that her situation was even worse because they never even had sex but this argument was never really convincing. I mean, what would you prefer? To be married with a guy you don’t love but at least leave you alone or to be married with a guy you don’t love and forces you to have sex with him? It didn’t help that both characters were rather poorly developed. Even if you wouldn’t really know from this movie, John Ruskin was actually apparently quite a brilliant man but, in this movie, he remained an enigma with some autistic features and some possible asexual pedophiliac tendencies. The main character was not much better and while everyone, except her husband and her in-laws, seemed to agree that she was ‘amazing’, she didn’t do anything really impressive except sulking through the whole duration. Anyway, to conclude, even if the story had some potential, I never cared much for the damned thing but I guess it might still be worth a look if you like the genre.