Up at the Villa

If you like stories about the British upper class and their foibles abroad, you'll enjoy"Up At the Villa." (What a rotten title!) Edward Fox is the perfect gentleman (isn't he always?) Sean Penn is the perfect cad. (Isn't he always?) And Anne Bancroft notches up yet another role as the faded bitch. (Doesn't she do anything else these days?) It's a pretty straight and predictable love story/murder who done it, except we know all along that the victim "done it" to himself. It's in something the same genre as "Tea With Mussolini" with lovely shots of Florence and a faithful recreation of fascist Italy.

It's the late 1930s around Florence. Sir Edgar Swift (James Fox) is the distinguished governor of Bengal who has come to court the widow Mary Panton (Kristin Scott Thomas). She loved her husband as he turned into a drunken gambler who squandered all of their money. Sir Swift proposes to her and she promises an answer upon his return. He leaves her with a gun as he fears a deteriorating security situation. She is hounded by Lucky Leadbetter (Derek Jacobi) who is after fresh-faced English young men. Princess San Ferdinando (Anne Bancroft) is a woman who had many flings and lots of connections. She introduces Mary to playboy Rowley Flint (Sean Penn) at a dinner party. Italian fascist Beppino Leopardi doesn't like Rowley. She rejects Rowley's advances and kicks him out of her car. She almost runs over Karl Richter (Jeremy Davies) who was a bad musician at the party. He's a refugee escaping the Nazis after organizing resistance as a student in Austria. She invites him back to her villa and they spend the night together. Leopardi imposes new restrictions on the foreign presence. Karl becomes unruly and Mary pulls out the gun. Karl takes it away and shoots himself with it. Rowley helps her dispose of the body.

Sean Penn somehow doesn't fit this time and this story. He never disappears into this role. He sticks out in this period piece like a sore thumb. Also the story lacks tension. There is some limited tension with Leopardi but that's resolved well before the end. The romance doesn't have any intensity. This should be a lot better. I do like Jeremy Davies' performance in a minor role.

I was intrigued when this film showed up on the day's TV roster and even more intrigued when I found out who the cast are and read a quick synopsis of the story. Most of the reviewers here, at IMDB, have made the movie sound dreadful. I found it hard to believe that anything with Sean Penn and Kristin Scott Thomas would be awful and had to check out the film for myself. My conclusion -- it is quite good, engaging, and definitely worth watching.

The lead actors as well as most of the supporting cast are rather wonderful. Though, I wish that someone slightly more dashing and not so limp played the role of the Austrian student, even if the stumbling manner and sudden onset of neurosis are required of the part. The scenery is inviting; the sets are great; the variety of accents is interesting; some of the extras are a bit shaky. The film is not so much about the setting, the era, or the social/political/economic spheres, though all of these have a firm bearing on the events and characters. It is chiefly about human actions under pressure of circumstances, about relationships, flights of fancy, slip-ups, weaknesses, trust and emotional maneuvering. "Up at the Villa" addresses these topics as good as any other period film.

I recommend this movie to those who, like I, enjoyed more than one of the following:

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Gosford Park

Howards End

Country Life

The Wings of the Dove

A Room with a View

The Remains of the Day

Beautiful photography and atmospherics capture Florence and environs. Technically very well-made and expensive-looking production.

Kristin Scott Thomas is perfect for the role and gives a terrific performance. The other cast members just seem to be giving their "standard" performance (Bancroft's standard mature woman routine that no one does better but she has done it since "The Hindenburg"). Ditto James Fox and the others.

The late William Holden could not have accomplished what Sean Penn did in "Mystic River", for which Penn gained a well deserved Oscar award. Conversely, Penn cannot play the Holden-type role in "Up at the Villa". Bad case of miscasting with flat results by Penn. No chemistry with Kristin Scott Thomas at all.

How can you make a dull, uninspiring film in an exotic setting with great actors in a highly charged brink-of-war scenario? SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE BUT THE FILMMAKER HERE HAS DONE IT!

As novelist, W. Somerset Maugham tends to be somewhat uninspiring; his short stories - frequently rather long - are better, and his essays run the whole gamut from the almost trivial to the almost philosophical. As a writer he is a long long way from novelists like Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Aldous Huxley: his characterization is shallow, unreal, such that wherever he sets his scenes - Pago Pago, Firenze or uptown London - one does not connect too well with the tale in question, which, often, fills one with a feeling akin to dejà vu: one has seen variations on the theme in previous writings of his. Maugham, then, is very much a one-horse matter, and in most cases, with the passing of time, his stories have become rather insipid.

So has 'Up at the Villa'. Even the wonderful Anne Bancroft could do little to rescue this film from being a rather colourless account of well-to-do stiff-upper-lip British people hanging out in Florence on the eve of the Second World War. The dialogues are stiff, wooden, lending much lacklustre to the proceedings and is clearly visible in the performances offered by what, on paper, is a solid cast. But one could not really care whether Kristin Scott Thomas finally made it with Sean Penn, James Fox, or the wretched violinist Jeremy Davies. This last named started off really well, but finally sank into the abjectedness which pervades this film, especially in the second half. The result is a very quaint outdated and outmoded behavioural incursion which ends up being almost farcical, as well as overblown and tedious.

No, this is not in any way comparable to 'Gosford Park' (qv) which is magnificent, again with Ms Scott Thomas, far superior with at once more depth and scintillating dialogues. Given the range of Maugham's writing, no way was this film ever to become comparable with 'Portrait of a Lady' (qv), say, 'The Hours' (qv), say, or even the powerful and majestic TV-mini 'Nostromo' (qv). However, 'Up at the Villa' does serve as a pointer inasmuch as it may show in which direction serious attempts at character-driven or dialogue-driven films may be heading, whether period pieces or not.

Nice photography in the Italian countryside, and am wondering if part of the film was in fact shot further north of Florence, maybe even in the Lombardy region.