Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours, 1 minute
Director: Ben Wheatley
Quick Impressions:
I’ve loved Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca since I became fascinated with it as a young child. I just re-watched it again with my daughter this summer since it was the thirteenth film to win Best Picture. Then in late August when school started, I reread the novel. (It brought me much needed comfort as I transitioned from going to bed at 6:30 am to waking up at 8:00 for online kindergarten with my son.)
Rebecca may be my favorite novel of the twentieth century. (It’s probably not. That seems like a huge claim, and I’m a bit drowsy at the moment. I’m sure I’m forgetting hundreds of other candidates for that singular honor.) But it’s easy to state this much with confidence. Daphne du Maurier’s novel is a masterpiece, and so is Hitchcock’s film, even though the novel and the film differ from one another in many key respects.
This new Rebecca is not a masterpiece. Now I know what you’re thinking. “Hitchcock’s film is a tough act to follow! Here’s the real question. Is this new film a good adaptation of the novel?”
No.
Still, the cast is excellent, and my mother and I were excited to watch it as part of her birthday celebration last weekend. By the time we found a moment to watch together, I had already heard some pretty bad buzz about this movie. But I was eager to watch myself and give it a fair chance. (Literary adaptations often get knee-jerk negative reactions from critics who don’t know the source material and aren’t invested in the story.) And then I read an interview with director Ben Wheatley in which he talked about Rebecca‘s surprising way of changing genres every few pages. I thought his take on the material seemed pretty interesting. In fact, what he was trying to do is far more interesting than what he does.
Now if my review seems unusually harsh, keep in mind that while watching, my daughter transformed into a mash-up of Comic Book Guy, Dorothy Parker, and Addison Dewitt from All About Eve. She probably has a future as a critic. And she had a lot to say about Rebecca (2020), all of it bad. But if you’re familiar with any other incarnation of the story at all, this movie is all too easy to bash. It’s haunted by the ghosts of all other Rebeccas, and in the end, it collapses under the weight of their influence and jumps out the window just like Mrs. Danvers wants.
I so wish somebody would retell Rebecca from the point of view of Mrs. Danvers, by the way. If I knew how to get permission for such a thing, I’d do it myself. Now that would be a movie!
The Good:
One thing about this movie does work, the Monte Carlo section at the beginning. And that’s about a third of the movie, so you can’t say that this new Rebecca is not enjoyable to watch…for a while.
“I let this movie get my hopes up,” my daughter complained repeatedly once it was over. “The beginning was good, and I got sucked into watching it thinking the rest would be good. But it just kept getting worse and worse.”
Ann Dowd makes an excellent Mrs. Van Hopper. She’s the most cruel and grotesque version of the character imaginable, but even though the film’s take on her is harsh, it seems broadly supported by the novel.
Lily James makes a fairly charming protagonist. I disagree increasingly with the way her character is portrayed as the movie goes on, but none of this is the actress’s fault. (To me it’s insane to think that Laurence Olivier wanted Vivien Leigh to play this part, although I can easily imagine her as a flashback Rebecca or a pretty brilliant Mrs. Danvers. I’m sure she could have been de-glammed for the lead role, but surely it would be easier to start with someone who is not Vivien Leigh!)
I actively liked Armie Hammer as Maxim de Winter. One thing that has always bothered me about Hitchcock’s brilliant film is the casting of Laurence Olivier as Maxim. Yes, obviously, he’s a good actor, but I think he seems too young for the part. Hammer fits the role a bit better in my opinion, and his performance is good throughout the film, though again, what is done with his character becomes increasingly bad. (The problem is not with his performance, but what he is given to do.) We all liked his yellow suit, though, and his car.
Monte Carlo itself looks gorgeous, and the extra emphasis on this initial romance-novel-like segment of the story is just fine.
Once the story moves to Manderley, the film flounders increasingly and never recovers. It essentially gets worse and worse until it spirals out of control, and we start to wonder, “Did she jump out the window and hit her head on a rock? Is this last part all an elaborate dream sequence?”
Most of the characters are not properly introduced in a way to make us care enough about them. Still, the performances are good. Keeley Hawes is very good as Maxim’s sister Bea, but the way she’s used is not particularly effective. We hardly notice her husband. It was nice to see Jeff Rawle as Frith since my parents are huge fans of Doc Martin. Bryony Miller makes an excellent Clarice.
Kristin Scott Thomas gives a good performance as Mrs. Danvers. This film doesn’t make her as spooky as Hitchcock’s, though the lesbian subtext is still there. (“When Mrs. de Winter was alive, we did it together.”) As in the novel, this Mrs. Danvers helped to raise Rebecca and came into the household with her when she married Maxim. Thomas gives us a terribly sad Mrs. Danvers, and I think her performance works. (We all really missed George Sanders, but Sam Riley is fine, too, though I think the character could be used better.)
The film certainly makes Cornwall look vast and beautiful. (Too bad it doesn’t look a bit more claustrophobic!) The music, I liked. And I liked a lot of small touches here and there–though I find it improbable that the family would own the originals of so many famous paintings even if Henry VIII did give them the house.
I was excited to see the book-inspired scene with Maxim’s grandmother (but then it wasn’t done right). And I thought the sleepwalking scene was a nice touch. (I wanted more like that, but the matter was just dropped.)
Best Scene:
I keep remembering excellent scenes that weren’t in Hitchcock’s film, then I realizing that I read those in the novel and imagined them myself.
What this film should have done best is something Hitchcock’s couldn’t do properly in 1940 because of the Hays Code. This is the best scene in the novel. This movie does contain that scene, but I didn’t particularly like the way it was filmed.
Best Scene Visually:
The film is lovely to look at, though these gorgeous landscape shots are somewhat wasted since they do not at all create the proper mood.
The sleepwalking scene has such potential.
The costume ball has some nice moments, visually, especially the protagonist’s confused flight.
Best Action Sequence:
The scene with the riding lesson vexed me a great deal, but it seems to be all I can remember now of the entire movie–except for Monte Carlo.
The Negatives:
This movie absolutely falls apart at the end. The first act is pretty good. The romance is a bit sexed up, and Mrs. Van Hopper is even more ugly and revolting than usual, and the part with the oysters is kind of silly, but it’s highly watchable, even so.
Then we get to Manderley, and the movie takes a turn for the worse. The problem with the second act is that there’s no sustained dramatic tension. In Hitchcock’s movie, this part of the film leaves the biggest impression. Rebecca clearly haunts the house, the housekeeper, Maxim, the narrator, everyone. She’s not tangibly present as a ghost, and yet the idea of her is somehow omnipresent, oppressing and tormenting the poor, meek protagonist.
This new 2020 Mrs. DeWinter is not particularly meek. Now, admittedly, Joan Fontaine kind of overdoes it, but Lily James is not meek at all. She’s a fish-out-of-water, sure. She’s awkward. She’s new. She has no experience running a house (or riding a horse). But she soon becomes awfully assertive and purpose driven, realizing her own agency far too quickly.
She does not exactly seem haunted by Rebecca, and her marriage seems to be going fine most of the time, except when she accidentally lets a visitor get a bit handsy with her, which honestly never would have happened in the way that it does here in the book. This seems thrown in to sex up the whole thing. I guess that’s fine.
Mrs. Danvers is around. She is sad. She is difficult (sometimes in a petty, obvious way). But she doesn’t really seem like the oppressive force she ought to be. She’s certainly not as creepy as the unblinking Judith Anderson. Now I have no problem with the way Kristin Scott Thomas plays the role, but the way Lily James reacts often seems inappropriate to me. She is not afraid of Mrs. Danvers at all. Instead, she seems annoyed at her, frustrated by her, even spiteful to her. She treats her like they’re pitted against each other in an old Warner Brothers’ cartoon. But she does not seem afraid of her in a way she is unable to articulate to her husband, nor does she seem particularly oppressed by the spirit of Rebecca.
Now, in Hitchcock’s film, the house itself seems to haunt the protagonist. It swallows her up. Thanks to the deep focus photography, costuming, and set decoration, she looks like one of the objects in the room, the one that pointedly doesn’t belong there. And yet she is trapped there in Rebecca’s house. Mrs. Danvers is creepy and sinister and terrifies the protagonist. The housekeeper is haunted by and obsessed with Rebecca (possibly sexually). She frightens and intimidates the second Mrs. de Winter.
In the book, the narrator begins feeling oppressed by Rebecca’s ghost from the very start. The house and the housekeeper are a bit less sinister than in Hitchcock’s film, but still, reminders of Rebecca and of Maxim’s love for her are everywhere, dominating the narrator’s life and ruining her marriage.
In this movie, you do not feel any of that. Rebecca is dead. That’s it. You don’t feel her oppressive presence. At all. You never get the sense that the protagonist feels that Maxim can never love her because he is still so passionately in love with Rebecca. You never get the idea that the protagonist constantly compares herself to Rebecca and finds herself lacking in every possible way. This woman seems to have quite a bit of self confidence, and she treats the whole thing like an adventure with occasional, frustrating setbacks. The very defining quality of Rebecca, what makes it Rebecca is completely missing from this movie. The tension is not there. What makes the story unique is absent. If you think about it this way, how could the movie get worse?
But then in the third act it does. The final portion of this movie plays out like some demented daydream. Suddenly Mrs. de Winter starts running around like Nancy Drew (in my words. My mother compared her to Jessica Fletcher). Up till now, I was thinking, “What strange creative choices,” but this final section of the film is just a failure.
Afterwards, I said to my mother, “Hitchcock’s film had such economy. He managed to do so much with every moment. This movie has serious pacing problems.” The last act is a rushed, jumbled, unrealistic mess. Why is the protagonist suddenly doing everything? Yes, she should come into her own as a woman here, finally gain some confidence in herself, begin to behave like an adult. But I mean, the narrator in the book does something heroic by strategically (yet genuinely) fainting. This protagonist yells out in court, and takes on the cops, and solves the mystery, and steals evidence, and tells the police what really happened with a satisfied smirk on her face. Meanwhile, all representatives of the local law are against Maxim, who in turn behaves like a rash idiot (in contrast to the relatively sensible behavior we see from him in other incarnations of this story).
And then, at the very end, things get even worse. “Ah, she’s started smoking now,” my mother noted. We end thinking, “Perhaps these two are morally bankrupt. Then again, maybe they’re not. In conclusion–who cares?”
This movie really needs to sell us hard on a vision of a Rebecca so perfect that no one could ever hope to wipe her love from Maxim’s mind. And then we need to see another vision of Rebecca. But we get neither of these. So nothing matters much. By the end, the protagonist is running around doing everything, and Rebecca is just an afterthought. Honestly, this movie would be more aptly titled What’s Her Name.
As my mother pointed out after the movie, the film “shows us all these big events that are really important in the story, but it doesn’t tell us why they’re important.” I thought she put that very well. The events that should be major story beats are all pretty much here, but they all feel like no big deal. They’re not set up properly, so we don’t feel them the way we should. If this were your introduction to this story, you would probably be constantly saying, “So? This seems kind of dumb.” That’s really a shame.
Overall:
If this movie were called What’s Her Name, the Story of Just Another Person Who Got Married I would respect it more and resent it less. If you’ve already seen Rebecca, the film is definitely worth watching for its cast (every one of them giving a good performance) and its beautiful location shots. The opening act in Monte Carlo is fairly strong. But if you are new to this story, I beg you, read the book first. Then watch Hitchcock’s film. After that, check out Rebecca (2020) when you get around to it.