Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Gillian Armstong's latest triumph is a juicy melodrama starring a stunning Cate Blanchett.
Dec 28, 2001 | For a movie that's essentially somber, "Charlotte Gray" is lush, even juicy entertainment. The director, Gillian Armstrong, has made a genre movie in a genre nobody works in anymore. "Charlotte Gray" is, at heart, a '40s women's melodrama, and to some viewers, especially younger ones, the movie might seem a mass of clichés.
Armstrong revels in the movieness of it all. She wants to sweep us up into a drama of wartime romance and intrigue, to delight in old-style movie glamour, and she pulls it off without resorting to gush. I ate it up.
"Charlotte Gray" doesn't have the freedom of Armstrong's great "High Tide," and the period setting -- occupied France -- doesn't breathe in the way the period settings of her "Mrs. Soffel" or "Little Women" did. Directors and actors frequently feel stymied in period pictures. The costumes and period decor put a barrier between them and the script until we feel as if we're in a museum whose purpose is to win Oscar nominations. With "Mrs. Soffel" and "Little Women," Armstrong didn't suffer those inhibitions; the movies were emotionally and dramatically direct.
"Charlotte Gray" comes to us through the glowing, daydreamy haze that movies and espionage novels have conferred on World War II. Although the material, taken from Sebastian Faulks' novel, has its basis in the true stories of the women who were agents for Britain's Special Operations Executive organization, "Charlotte Gray" takes its cues from the ways in which we have come to think of World War II as a movie.
"Charlotte Gray"
Directed by Gillian Armstrong
Starring Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Michael Gambon, Rupert Penry-Jones
Perhaps even people who lived at the time, though at a safe enough remove from combat, romanticize their memories of the era. Part of that tendency is, of course, that WWII was the last war we could feel really good about, the one whose necessity (except to the extreme reaches of the right and left) has never been in doubt. And because of the vastness of the war, all sorts of people, not just veterans, took part in it, especially in Europe, where everyday life was directly touched by combat -- the Occupation of France or the Blitz, to name the two most famous examples.
World War II has probably produced more good stories than any event in history, and 60 years later, the storehouse of tales doesn't seem close to being exhausted.
Lately, some artists have tried to blend the hold the war has on our romantic imaginations with a sense of the complexities that even a war of good against evil entails. The most notable of them is Alan Furst, whose novels of Europe in the '30s and '40s are both luxuriant yarns and obsessively researched detailings of split factions, as well as examinations of the war's moral contingencies. "Charlotte Gray" isn't as dense and detailed as Furst's work, but it's a pretty terrific read.
It's the story of a Scottish girl who goes to London to work as a medic, falls in love with an RAF pilot, and then volunteers for undercover work in France after he's shot down. "Charlotte Gray" is basically a literary romance novel, but that's not a put-down. It's full of lovemaking and undercover missions and noble speechifying ("Resistance will come in the end. It will come when people see they've been misled. Your problem, monsieur, the problem of the government you support is this -- you took a gamble. You decided to act in a way that you considered practical. All considerations of honour and morality were put to one side because they looked subsidiary in the light of events -- the overwhelming probability that Germany would win the war. And that, monsieur, is the danger of politics. If its practical assumptions prove to be false, you have nothing left to fall back on, because you have already sacrificed morality.")
