THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN (1981) ** There's too much talent involved in this production not to enjoy it, but it does drag terribly throughout, and everyone involved has been much more effective elsewhere. I haven't read the John Fowles novel, but my suspicion is that he paints a central character more mysterious and alluring than what Meryl Streep projects. Streep's performance is uncharacteristically uneven, most fatally in her definitive seaside scene where she appears more nutty and beleaguered than, you know, mysterious and alluring. Harold Pinter wrote an ambitious cinematic presentation, but the juxtaposition of a similar theme between Victorian England and the contemporary film industry is more distracting, for me, than illuminating. I doubt that many late 20th century film viewers needed much convincing that contemporary attitudes towards sexual matters were somewhat improved from those under Queen Victoria (who, it has been said, was something of a libertine without broadcasting it). The matter of the contrasting endings is worthy of some reflection, I think, but probably not worth everything that Pinter tried to put into it. Jeremy Irons frequently summons the majesty and mystique of a Darwinian at odds with a culture run by willful idiots, but at other times he's just too cardboard cut-out-like to carry a film that, despite Karel Reisz' consistently tasteful shots, struggles to sustain interest. It's a film that's supposed to be all about passion, and so there's a problem when the most immediately obvious passion is that of the writer for the script, and it's a more unrequited love than he deserves.
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