BEFORE: Theo James carries over from "Lying and Stealing", and that kind of makes we want to drop the whole "Divergent" series in here before continuing on, but I'm sorry, I just don't have the space for it. Some other time, maybe. Same goes for "The Benefactor" and "How it Ends" - two days ago I didn't even know who Theo James was, and now I see that I could have planned a whole week around this guy, so I'm going to have to circle back somehow.
Yes, I know this appears to be a romance film, and those belong in February, generally speaking - unless, of course, one doesn't seem to connect very well with the others on my list and also I need to use it as mortar to connect the bricks together. Tomorrow's film takes me back to the MCU for the first time in a long while, so that's what justifies the placement here.
THE PLOT: A young woman courts a mysterious wealthy suitor in 19th century England.
AFTER: If not for the blind casting, one might think that perhaps someone found and adapted a lost Jane Austen manuscript perhaps. But no, it turns out that the book this was adapted from was released in 2009, still at the time probably meant as an homage to Austen's works. I bet the author was very upset that the title "Pride and Prejudice" was already taken, it could have been even more applicable here. ("Pride and Racial Prejudice"? Nah, too many words.)
But it's weird that nobody makes an issue out of race in this film, which pushes it into the realm of fantasy for me, because we all just KNOW that England didn't work this way in the early 1800's, right? There was obviously a racial hierarchy, with Caucasians on top, and you can cast as many people of color in your movie as you want, but it won't change that fact. It might make you feel good about yourself, that you formed an ethnically diverse cast and thus you followed the current guidelines and the studio made its quota, but still, people back then were very very racist, and there's no getting around that. It was a different time - so the world depicted here, where nobody gives a damn about the color of anybody's skin, I'm pretty sure it was never that way. The U.K. had colonized India and parts of Africa, and were shipping as much of the tea and other resources as they could back home, when they weren't fighting wars.
Come on, look me straight in the eye and tell me that a man of African descent had a chance of becoming in "honourable" in 1820's England. Can't do it, can you? Explain to me how it makes sense to have a Japanese actress cast as the mother of an actress whose real mother was from Uganda. It's madness - and that's where blind casting fails me, because I can't unsee it, the fact that these characters look nothing alike and are supposed to be related to each other. This is not a Christmas commercial designed to appeal to bi-racial couples, this is an aristocratic family and we need to see the relationships reflected in the characters on the screen. OK, whatever, rant over, you can cast your movie however you like but I just think it doesn't make any sense.
Anyway, the problems start when the most eligible bachelor, Mr. Jeremy Malcolm, takes the beautiful Julia Thistlewaite out to the opera, and then he ghosts her. She might have been OK with it, but then a caricature of him not calling on her again (or not being impressed by her, which is really hard to portray in a drawing...) is printed up and sold all over town. This is a thinly-veiled jab at social media, which is another thing that just didn't exist back then, but hey, we're looking at the 1800's through a modern lens, so whatever, I guess. Julia is thoroughly embarasssed, and sends her cousin Cassidy to investigate what she might have done to offend Mr. Malcolm, and he learns that there is a written checklist concerning the qualities that Mr. Malcolm is looking for in a mate, and Julia just didn't check any of the boxes. She didn't even know the list existed, so how could she be expected to fulfill the requirements? Well, yeah, but that was kind of the point - everyone's got at least a mental checklist regarding what we're looking for, he shouldn't be held accountable for this.
Julia should have just let it go, but she's not capable of that. Instead she decides to enlist her friend Selina to date Mr. Malcolm, they make sure that Selina ticks all the boxes and fulfills all the parameters, and the plan is to then, once Mr. Malcolm professes his love for her, produce another list of the qualities that Selina is looking for in a husband, and game the system with a list of qualities that Mr. Malcolm does NOT possess, so that he will feel the same inadequacy that Julia experienced. Yeah, it's a little immature and high-schoolish, but hey, that's Julia.
The plan goes awry after Selina, visiting from Sussex, meets Mr. Malcolm and finds nothing wrong with him, they are quite compatible naturally, without her needing to pretend to meet the checklist qualities (although some fakery is still involved, like Selina pretending to play the pianoforte when it's really Cassidy's hands on the keys). Selina suggests that Julia was perhaps wrong about Mr. Malcolm, and though the plan proceeds, she appears to be really falling in love and not just pretending.
Just then, Captain Henry Ossery appears in the picture, he knows both parts of this couple, friends with Mr. Malcolm and also Selina, who took care of his elderly aunt in Bath for several years. Ossery also begins going for promenades with Selina, and requests a dance at the upcoming ball. This sets up the love triangle which will ultimately become the quadrangle, trust me on this one, I've seen it happen so many times...
Julia's plan is almost ruined by the appearance of vulgar Cousin Gertie (who's Korean-American somehow) as "the list" dictates that Mr. Malcolm's perfect woman must have genteel and pleasing family members. Julia covers by claiming that Gertie is HER cousin, 7 times removed, but Selina now sees Mr. Malcolm in a different light, how judgmental he's become - would he still be interested in Selina if he knew that Gertie was her cousin? The whole scheme (and the budding relationship) is nearly subverted when Mr. Malcolm learns the truth, but still, they soldier on. He invites everyone over to his large estate for a masquerade ball, as one does.
There's really only one reason for a masked ball in a movie, and that's for someone to wear a mask and pretend to be someone else. Since Selina no longer wants to be part of the plan, Julia locks her in a room, assumes her identity and completes her plan to deliver a list of her own to Mr. Malcolm, pointing out the ways in which he's not suitable. No doubt the first one is the fact that he keeps listing other people's qualities. Number two is the fact that he's way too organized about this and number three is that he needs to learn to relax and accept people the way they are, I bet. This new scheme is immediately exposed, and Mr. Malcolm rejects both Julia AND Selina, and swears he's over women. And lists.
There's a last-ditch effort to reunite Mr. Malcolm and Selina by sending them both invitations to a tour of the rose garden at 3:00 pm. Selina's disappointed because she thought it would be a group tour, and Mr. Malcolm's disappointed because he just saw it as one more manipulation to "entrap" him into marriage. Dude, you've got to learn to lighten up and let things go. Even if she did trick you into meeting in the rose garden, which she didn't, would that even be so bad? She's into you, let it freakin' happen already! Have fun with your lists and being alone.
Well, the takeaway is that Caucasian people don't have a monopoly on being stuck-up and anal-retentive and also having OCD. So umm, congratulations, I guess?
Also starring Freida Pinto (last seen in "Love Wedding Repeat"), Sope Dirisu (last seen in "The Huntsman: Winter's War"), Zawe Ashton (last seen in "Velvet Buzzsaw"), Oliver Jackson-Cohen (last not-seen in "The Invisible Man"), Ashley Park, Divian Ladwa (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Naoko Mori (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Sophie Vavasseur (last seen in "Becoming Jane"), Sianad Gregory, Doña Croll (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman"), Paul Tylak (last heard in "The Secret of Kells"), Dawn Bradfield (last seen in "King Arthur" (2004)), Gerry O'Brien (ditto), Aisling Doyle, Tia Ann Jain, Emma Willis, Danielle Ryan, Derek Carroll, Tom Lawlor
RATING: 4 out of 10 bird-hunting dogs
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