Photo courtesy of Netflix
Rebecca (2020)
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” is the memorable opening line of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation and the new on Netflix version from director Ben Wheatley. Strike the last third of that thought because there is nothing memorable about Wheatley’s rendering, which will live only as a footnote in Du Maurier’s filmography which includes classic adaptations such as Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) along with Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and Rebecca.
Wheatley’s Rebecca stars Lily James as the story’s unnamed narrator-protagonist and Armie Hammer as Maxim de Winter, lord of doomed Manderley and the protagonist’s troubled husband. They are an attractive couple but, despite James getting the tone almost right of her performance as the young innocent in her husband’s psychologically treacherous lair, they are mannequin-stiff next to Hitchcock’s stars, the fragile and terrified Joan Fontaine and the broodingly obsessive Laurence Olivier.
The lead performances captured in the 1940 Rebecca owe more of their brilliance to the director than the actors. Fontaine was often on the verge of over reaction, but the camera cut away just in time, and the American actress may have been deliberately ostracized by the British cast to amplify her discomfort. Olivier’s mind was elsewhere through much of the film, as was the character he played. In Wheatley’s rendition, Kristin Scott Thomas steals the show as the monomaniacal Mrs. Danvers, the baleful and pinch-lipped housekeeper who continually reminds James’ character that she can never measure up to Rebecca, Maxim’s late first wife whose ghost—metaphorically?—haunts the castle by the sea known as Manderley.
Although the two films share many scenes, Wheatley and his crew of screenwriters are—up to a point—truer to the novel than Hitchcock, who had to trim du Maurier’s contemporary gothic story to fit the rigid censorship of 1940s Hollywood. The result may have had fewer plot twists but made for a more impactful and, yes, haunting film.
Spoiler alert: the conflagration at Wheatley’s climax is computer generated state-of-the-mediocre, and then, as if being ironic, he tacks on the sort of happy ending Du Maurier and Hitchcock avoided. The new Rebecca is nicely furnished, as pleasing to the eye as “Downton Abbey” (James was a cast member) and includes a bit of inspired casting in Keeley Hawes (“Durrells in Corfu”) as Maxim’s compassionately fussbudget sister. However, in the end, Wheatley’s Rebecca takes its place behind such pointless efforts as Jonathan Demme’s retitled 2002 remake of Charade and Gun Van Sant’s 1998 Psycho and only adds evidence to the proposition that a classic film is hard to top.
To read more Film Reviews, click here.
To read more articles by David Luhrssen, click here.
