Sofia Coppola has always been attracted to odd stories, but her adaptation of Don Siegel’s 1971 Civil War drama is strange for a different reason. A nasty, crudely styled slice of gothic exploitation, filled with characters driven by their basest desires, it seems miles away from her usual cool and plaintive aesthetic.
The opening of The Beguiled is promising, filled with the feminine drama at which Coppola excels. Nicole Kidman plays the matriarchal figure in Miss Farnsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies, a white-columned Virginia mansion shielding several young women – including sorrowful teacher Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) and sneaky Alicia (Elle Fanning) - from the Civil War, raging just miles away. Their quiet, regimented lives are interrupted by the appearance of Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell), a handsome Union deserter nursing a wounded leg.
Coppola eschews making her women Puritanical caricatures. Their attraction to McBurney isn’t due to sexual repression, but boredom, and the frisson a new person brings. Like much of Coppola’s work, she captures the ennui of privileged women denied freedom and movement. Though the gritty realities of war are left onscreen (including, controversially, a black slave character from the original), the physical and psychic boundaries governing the women are as suffocating as the rules stifling the Lisbon sisters, or the corseted lifestyle of Marie Antoinette.
However, this emotional edit defangs the pretty picture. Even Farrell’s McBurney isn’t portrayed as a manipulative predator, merely a, well, Colin Farrell-esque rogue. This lack of carnality and the original’s psychosexual pulp elements leave the characters’ motivations unclear, and their rapid descent into sex, violence and revenge less that believable.
This aloof period drama just doesn’t let its crisp white petticoats get sullied enough.