I watched this last night with a fellow history-and-lit geek. (She’d read the Louis Bayard novel it was based on; I hadn’t. It had been a while for her so she didn’t remember all the details.)
I liked it overall, though its bleakness means I might not be in a hurry to watch it again. The visuals–the Hudson River Valley in the dead of winter–are stunning, as are the costumes. (Though some scenes are so darkly lit that it’s hard to see the details–not unlike The Batman.)
More to the point, we get top-notch acting. Christian Bale, on whom I’ve crushed since 1999, is incapable of giving a bad performance. We also get Timothy Spall (thinner than usual), Gillian Anderson (who’s made quite a name for herself in costume dramas), and Toby Jones (made to look taller). But the real standout is Harry Melling as West Point Cadet Edgar Allan Poe. Needless to say, he knocks the portrayal out of the park…and appearance-wise, you can imagine him with a mustache gazing mournfully out of that famous photograph of Edgar Allan Poe. And except for the eyes, I wouldn’t have known this was the same guy who played Dudley Dursley. (And did you know that he’s also the grandson of Second Doctor Patrick Troughton?)
But there was one obstacle that kind of bugged me. Look…as a lover of historical drama on the page and onscreen, I don’t always go over stories with a fine-toothed comb for historical accuracy. The only times historical inaccuracies bother me is when they’re lazy, blatantly out of place (as in a recent Disney YA novel about the Headless Horseman) or inserted for a shallow reason. I can accept them if they’re none of these, and in service to making a good story work. That’s why I’m okay with the inaccuracies in the musical 1776 (which the authors explained about in an afterword to the published playscript). Or Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde…I can enjoy it for a great film while also acknowledging that it’s nothing close to the real story. Or a key scene in Anne of the Thousand Days…that scene in Anne’s cell could not have happened. Henry never visited Anne in the Tower and their marriage had been annulled by that point, so Anne would have had no reason to believe that Elizabeth would one day be queen. But DAMN, it made for a great dramatic scene.
However, in this case, the entire story turns on this particular plot point. So the whole thing goes up in a puff of historical accuracy if you realize how unlikely it is that an innocent young woman in 1830, the daughter of a devoted father, a man who is a retired police constable and would therefore be perfectly aware of what some men can be capable of, would be allowed to walk from her home to a ball at nearby West Point, a gathering full of young men, and back home again in the dead of night…completely alone, unescorted, unchaperoned. As I said, I’ve never read the novel, so I don’t know if Bayard addresses this point of nineteenth-century conduct.
So it’s well worth watching, but that point of accuracy does stick in the craw of anyone who’s familiar with the strict rules of conduct in the 1800s.
