"The Affair of the Necklace"

In an ill-advised costume drama with Hilary Swank, you take the movie's pleasures where you find them, in the corners of the room or under the rug.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Nov 30, 2001 | It isn't that Hilary Swank can't play women. She looks smashing crammed into those tight-bodiced 18th-century gowns she wears in "The Affair of the Necklace." But as you watch this inflated Hollywood costume drama -- and the best thing I can say about it is that the costumes and the hambone acting keep it from being a deadly bore -- you keep thinking that Swank is at her best in two scenes. There's the one where she briefly wears a man's three-cornered hat and mugs in front of her mirror, and then there's the one where the tight-bodiced gown comes off.

But apparently Swank can't play this woman: Jeanne de la Motte Valois, the sort-of heroine of this barely comprehensible and deeply unthrilling true-life tale of the ancien régime. Swank's hoity-toity pronunciation is straight out of high school drama class (her father, she tells a detractor, "spoke out a-gaynst poff-erty and tee-ra-nee"); she's clumsy and unhappy in the role in much the same way that this whole movie is unhappy with itself.

"The Affair of the Necklace" is never outrageously bad. It might be more enjoyable if it were. As the lipsticked and lecherous Louis de Rohan -- who, as he constantly reminds us, is "Cardinal of all France" -- Jonathan Pryce prowls through the gardens of Versailles with one eyebrow raised, trying to nudge the whole thing into camp spectacle, without, alas, much success. But for the most part the movie is just pretty and pointless.

In fact, this is a good example of what can happen when a bunch of grownup humans who really ought to know better get funny ideas about art. Director Charles Shyer is a Hollywood lifer with a career of writing and directing popular comedy that stretches from "Happy Days" and "Smokey and the Bandit" in the 1970s right on up to "The Parent Trap" in 1998. What in God's name made him believe he was the right guy to make a movie about an aristocratic scandal that helped to destroy the French monarchy in the 1780s? The results are tedious and polite; it's like watching a bunch of party-hearty frat boys wearing ties and mumbling their way through a cocktail-party conversation about Shakespeare.

I can certainly see the appeal of making a big-budget movie about L' affaire du collier, one of the principal events that confirmed the French public's sense that King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, were extravagant parasites who needed neckline adjustments. But Hollywood has never excelled at this variety of decadent spectacle, or at least not since the days of Erich von Stroheim and Ernst Lubitsch. If it needs to be done at all, it's better left to British and European filmmakers who are steeped in it and can better appreciate both its beauty and its rottenness. (Among living directors, I'd suggest Luc Besson, Jean-Jacques Annaud and Patrice Chéreau as obvious candidates.)

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