Director: Philip Haas. Cast: Kristin Scott Thomas, Sean Penn, Anne Bancroft, James Fox, Jeremy Davies, Derek Jacobi, Massimo Ghini. Screenplay: Belinda Haas (based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham).
The only coherent way to understand Philip Haas' Up at the Villa, the only way the film makes sense, is to interpret it as a sort of spoof of itself: not a standard-issue Brits-in-Italy melodrama, but a sly, subtle exposure of how overcooked and preposterous the entries in that genre tend to be. I have several friends who found Up at the Villa hopelessly labored, which was also the near-universal reaction of critics. But neither director Haas nor his screenwriter/wife Belinda has ever made a film that served up familiar conventions without inviting us to ruminate on them, to observe them from a new distance. If I ever meet the makers of Up at the Villa and discover that their aim was to make a sincere 1940s potboiler, I'll rescind the benefit of the doubt and accept that they've made a very great botch indeed. But these are smart people we're dealing with, and both the performances and the visual scheme betray enough winky wit that I'm confident in the project's status as an elaborate joke. And on those terms, I had a whale of a time watching it.
Kristin Scott Thomas, so stirring in Philip and Belinda Haas' Angels & Insects, stars here as Mary Panton, an unmarried Englishwoman living in Tuscany whose patrician features disguise her decidedly plebeian circumstances. Mary is flat broke, and in truth, her disguise isn't really working. The upper-crusty women who preside over Mary's social set know that she needs a husband to save her from "ruin," that perennial bogeyman of period drama. The film begins with a shot of these tongue-wagging dames, headed by Anne Bancroft's Princess San Ferdinando, standing on a balcony, looking down on Mary as she dances in the titular villa with Sir Edgar Swift (James Fox), a rising figure in English politics who is soon to accept a prestigious post in India.
Though Bancroft & Co. literally look down on Mary in this shot, we in turn are looking down on her; the camera is inviting us to examine everyone from a superior analytical position, which is an early cue that we aren't to take the characters or their plights particularly seriously. In fact the real focus of this scene isn't whether Mary is in social danger—who doesn't want to marry Kristin Scott Thomas??—but the gaudy decor and garish colors of the scene. Up at the Villa is on to how the British upper class, particularly their expatriate division, loved nothing more than to create enclaves of ostentation wherever they settled in the world, and to spend their time in these appalling settings feigning a concern with beauty, art, and "propriety." Indeed, probably the last thing that bored, independent Mary should do is wed a stuffed-shirt who will keep her trapped in this tedious, amoral sphere. Kristin Scott Thomas, a very sharp actress often underused, plays Mary as a woman less interested in following the rules than in showily defying them, but with ideas more limited and naïve than she thinks they are. Notching her voice up to a breathy whine, she purposefully makes Mary slightly ridiculous—she is not immune from the class critique the filmmakers are mounting—but, as ever, the actress's face is so fascinating that we never stop caring about Mary. We still like her, though director, screenwriter, and star make clear that we shouldn't love her.
Mary meets a perfect accomplice in her reckless social subversion in Rowley Flint, an American gadfly and globetrotter played by Sean Penn. Though Penn doesn't have as large a role as his billing suggests, he fares very well in a suave role utterly removed from the bottom-feeders of Carlito's Way, Hurlyburly, and Sweet and Lowdown. Up at the Villa features two dynamite sequences, and they both focus on Scott Thomas and Penn. The first follows Mary and Rowley as he drives her home after a society dinner. His romantic and sexual propositions are severely rebuffed, but his iconoclastic temper ignites Mary's most reckless impulses. After leaving Penn, she picks up an indigent Austrian refugee (Saving Private Ryan's Jeremy Davies) and takes him for a walk through her garden and a romp in her bed. This casual intercourse represents poor, misguided Mary's attempt at social activism. It simply doesn't occur to her that initiating a one-night tryst with a poor foreign exile she has no intention of seeing again smacks at all of condescension, or vanity, or complete political imbecility. The interactions between Scott Thomas and Davies, both before and after their hot night, are well-filmed, but the disastrous aftermath is better, when Mary enlists Rowley's help in destroying the evidence of her increasingly disastrous mishaps.
For all kinds of reasons, this material, adapted from W. Somerset Maugham's novel, seems more satirical than sincere. If casting Kristin Scott Thomas as a sexual naif and Sean Penn as Cary Grant doesn't already set off your parody alarm, Up at the Villa also offers a pointed narrative of how relentlessly the British hold Americans in contempt, until they need saving from their own international melees. Maugham's novel, like much of his work, offers its melodrama with such a straight face that critics and readers have debated for years whether he took his own plots seriously. Philip and Belinda Haas cheekily honor that tradition by refusing to play the satire too broadly, and I expect that's why so many viewers have dismissed Up at the Villa as inane. Quite to the contrary, I contend that the novel and the film both expose its British expatriate community as so hypocritically "refined" and so debauchedly epicurean—the film's funniest shot shows a tennis court conveniently rimmed with bushels of enormous tomatoes—that inanity is inescapable. In a way, Mary cannot possibly act "immorally" in a society so ignorant of real moral responsibility. Rowley knows this, and when Mary learns it, she takes a whole new sort of glee in confounding expectations and breaking codes. The parody is delivered so deftly that the broader comic stylings of Anne Bancroft, though less garish than we've come to expect from her, still seem crude by comparison.
The last half-hour of Up at the Villa deviates most drastically from its source material. The filmmakers work harder than Maugham did to overtly connect the deludedness of the characters to the political circumstances of Mussolini's Italy. I wouldn't call any of these scenes mistaken, exactly, but they do seem a little familiar from earlier films, and Up at the Villa coasts along showing us a good, hammy time without adding anything to its satiric agenda. Still, Scott Thomas and Penn appear to enjoy themselves extravagantly, and they made me wish Hollywood matched actors of their intelligence more often, and more evenly. Though Up at the Villa may not be as "good" a film as Angels and Insects, in a way it's even more unexpected and subversive, and I adored seeing empty-headed Italian escapades like Enchanted April and the unbearable Tea with Mussolini getting skewered within an inch of their weightless lives. Like those films, Up at the Villa lingers on its costumes, sets, and scenery, but this time we can't help noticing how ugly it all looks; it's the society that is overripe, not the film itself, which is wonderfully smart and controlled. Don't assume that filmmakers aren't laughing just because you don't hear any jokes. Grade: B+