Review
REPUBLIC OF LOVE
Starring Bruce Greenwood and Emilia Fox
Directed by Deepa Mehta
Opens Friday, February 13
Check listings
Too often we cut too much slack to Canadian films, simply because they’re Canadian.
If a Canadian film is great we righteously trumpet its success, cajoling as many people as we can into the theatre to support our national artists. But, if the movie is less than stellar, which happens more often than not, it is our tendency to politely point to its strengths while downplaying its weaknesses.
Not this time.
Deepa Mehta (the talented Indo-Canadian director of Bollywood/Hollywood and Fire) has adapted Carol Shields’s novel, The Republic of Love, straight into the less-than-stellar category. In fact, it’s the worst film she’s made.
The primary reason for Mehta’s failure is the incongruity of the elements she’s attempted to thrust together. Strange animation and shabby special effects, farce and romantic comedy, Sitar music and Canadian rock, genuine emotion and caricature, fantasy, reality and sitcom cheese all combine to form a discordant film experience. It’s like watching Terry Gilliam, Nora Ephron, and David Cronenberg trying to direct a film by committee.
Granted, she comes by this failure honestly – after all, Shields’s novel follows the parallel narratives and points of view of Tom Avery and Fay McLeod as they make their way through urban loneliness to discover each other’s love. Carol Shields balanced these competing perspectives successfully, uncovering the truth of her main characters’ emotional lives without trivializing the supporting characters and events. Mehta undoubtedly attempts to achieve the same balance, but her morass of film styles only succeeds in trivializing the entire film.
For instance, while Fay (Emilia Fox), a folklorist specializing in mermaids, is in France, looking into a reported mermaid sighting, she receives her first love letter from Tom (Bruce Greenwood) at her hotel. She talks to the concierge over the phone and has him read her the letter. This is very nearly how it happens in Shields’s novel, except that the onscreen concierge is a weird combination of two of John Cleese’s most famous characters – Basil Fawlty and the French Taunter. There was a simple beauty to the scene in Shields’s prose, in film it degenerates into Pythonesque farce, and the audience is left wondering about the sanity of Fay and Tom rather than the inevitability of their love.
The oddness of this scene, however, is merely heightened by the scenes that follow. The next thing we know, Tom and Fay have a quiet, realistic moment in the airport, hugging one another in a shot that has appeared a thousand times before in Meg Ryan romantic comedies. And seconds later they’re driving down the impossibly clean and sterile streets we’ve come to expect from post-cyberpunk, sci-fi movies.
Then there are the uneven performances of Mehta’s leads. Greenwood is as solid and endearing as ever, playing late-night radio host Tom, but Fox is painful as Fay. The nicest thing that can be said about her performance is that her Canadian accent is better than Kevin Costner’s English accent in Robin Hood, but just slightly worse than Harrison Ford’s Russian accent in K-19. Oh yeah, she also had convincing chemistry with her onscreen father, Richard, but since Richard was played by Edward Fox (her real life dad) it’s not like she had to act.
It’s too bad Mehta dedicated The Republic of Love to the memory of Carol Shields. Ms. Shields would likely have wanted to forget that this movie ever existed. |
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.