Wetherby

Home Vision Entertainment DVD

Why Vanessa Redgrave is a beacon of English acting can best be seen in Wetherby, the first film directed by playwright David Hare. She portrays one of Hare's intellectual gorgons: Jean Travers, a schoolteacher who, by accident, gets involved in a stranger's horrific suicide. The character is a bitch, and so is the role. But Redgrave nails it-giving layer by translucent layer of a person who harbors bitterness throughout the years, against her better instincts.

Instead of showing off fine diction and airy superiority, Redgrave makes this dramatization of a diffident British matron very plain and humane. Her plainness is the marvel. Rumor was that Hare devised the role in an attempt to make sense of Margaret Thatcher as a product of British history. But famously lefty Vanessa doesn't let politics get in her way; her artistry wins out. She turns a Thatcherlike woman into the complicated, poignant, fallible human being Thatcher ought to be.

Wetherby is a character study that masquerades as a mystery-suspense film. Hare and Redgrave uncover two puzzles: the reason behind a man's suicide and the story behind Jean's personally crippling reserve. Young Jean is played by Redgrave's daughter Joely Richardson; surprisingly, there's less visible connection than you might expect. But Richardson's bold display of Jean's sexual yearning is surely an inherited trait. Hare's idea that Jean's sex life might explain all recalls Hitchcock's Marnie, but every time the camera goes to a close-up of Vanessa, every intrigue settles in her handsome countenance. Screen acting doesn't get better than the opening scene, where Jean indulges her best male friend (Ian Holm) telling a joke about Richard Nixon. She listens. There's more affection in her face than curiosity. And then Jean responds with a remark of gender parity showing that she is both intelligent and kind. It's Marnie made real.

But the biggest surprise in Wetherby is Hare's directorial daring. The movie is unusually filmic, betraying no hint of Hare's theatrical background. He and cinematographer Stuart Harris shift between the Second World War and the 1980s with a fluidity and compositional precision you can't help admiring. No doubt the major influence is Alain Resnais-especially Muriel, his drama of political and personal history. In Wetherby, Hare and Redgrave scrutinize an individual to understand a place (the title refers to Jean's estate). They raise patriotism to admirable art.