An English war widow, Florence Green (Emily Mortimer, gentle as a lamb), converts an old house in a small seaside town into her home and her livelihood: a bookshop, heavy on novels. In spite of her intelligence, she trusts everybody, which is a mark of innocence, but also of foolishness.
I don't know if Penelope Fitzgerald had Aesop in mind when she published "The Bookshop" (1979), but as adapted in this movie, her story boils down to his simple but haunting fable, "The Wolf and the Lamb." The moral: Tyrants take no pity on innocents.
But while Aesop requires only a few terrifying paragraphs, "The Bookshop" takes almost two hours-- and misses the moral because it's too busy cuddling the lamb.
When Florence is warned that the town dowager will stop at nothing to gain control of the house for her own purposes, does she take steps to protect her investment? No. She keeps doing business with her lawyer who, even in her credulous eyes, is a charlatan. She hires a slick opportunist, a man she dislikes, merely because he asks her to. In short, she's a patsy. A lot of good people are.
The odd thing is we're obviously supposed to admire her, even though her actions prove her to be imprudent, stubborn, and naïve. She's lauded for her courage, but courage without judgment is a formula for disaster, and disaster befalls her because that dowager (Patricia Clarkson, more voracious than a wolf) is a merciless tyrant. If you expect justice from a tyrant, you are a fool.
Florence has another problem: she's more fantasy than flesh and blood. A one-dimensional character. The only thing she adores as much as books was her husband. They met in a London bookshop, where they organized the poetry section together. Poetry. Of course. Because history, biography, science, etc., don't reek of Romance, which this story does. Romance with a capital R. In other words romance minus sex...
Florence's first customer, posh Edmund Brundish (Bill Nighy), is almost two-dimensional. An elderly misanthrope, he becomes rather smitten with her, but stiff upper lips don't incline toward kisses. The only other 2-D character has the same two D's: a miniature female version of Brundish, the ten-year-old shop girl, Christine (Honor Kneafsey) is a budding misanthrope who prizes Florence. She barely plausible, though, being the kind of child you find only in fiction: as articulate and tough-talking as a adult but with none of the natural vulnerability of a child.
There is one standout performance: Patricia Clarkson as Violet, the evil dowager. She is pure evil, which is disappointing, as I said. Her corrupt actions don't even end with deploying a nephew who is in Parliament to pass an eminent domain bill that allows her to simply claim the old house from Florence. But she comes to life in the scene where Bill Nighy arrives at her manse to tell her to back off from Florence, because Clarkson delivers a master class in film acting. Before admitting him, she pauses for just a few seconds to prepare her reaction. There is no dialog-- i.e., elemental cinema. She merely stands, her beatific smile tinged with smugness, as she rehearses the ever-so-delicate gestures she will use on him-- a dismissive tilt of the head, an almost imperceptible shrug of one shoulder. Violet is revealed, so cold it gave me chills. An exquisite display of film as a visual medium.
I don't know if Penelope Fitzgerald had Aesop in mind when she published "The Bookshop" (1979), but as adapted in this movie, her story boils down to his simple but haunting fable, "The Wolf and the Lamb." The moral: Tyrants take no pity on innocents.
But while Aesop requires only a few terrifying paragraphs, "The Bookshop" takes almost two hours-- and misses the moral because it's too busy cuddling the lamb.
When Florence is warned that the town dowager will stop at nothing to gain control of the house for her own purposes, does she take steps to protect her investment? No. She keeps doing business with her lawyer who, even in her credulous eyes, is a charlatan. She hires a slick opportunist, a man she dislikes, merely because he asks her to. In short, she's a patsy. A lot of good people are.
The odd thing is we're obviously supposed to admire her, even though her actions prove her to be imprudent, stubborn, and naïve. She's lauded for her courage, but courage without judgment is a formula for disaster, and disaster befalls her because that dowager (Patricia Clarkson, more voracious than a wolf) is a merciless tyrant. If you expect justice from a tyrant, you are a fool.
Florence has another problem: she's more fantasy than flesh and blood. A one-dimensional character. The only thing she adores as much as books was her husband. They met in a London bookshop, where they organized the poetry section together. Poetry. Of course. Because history, biography, science, etc., don't reek of Romance, which this story does. Romance with a capital R. In other words romance minus sex...
Florence's first customer, posh Edmund Brundish (Bill Nighy), is almost two-dimensional. An elderly misanthrope, he becomes rather smitten with her, but stiff upper lips don't incline toward kisses. The only other 2-D character has the same two D's: a miniature female version of Brundish, the ten-year-old shop girl, Christine (Honor Kneafsey) is a budding misanthrope who prizes Florence. She barely plausible, though, being the kind of child you find only in fiction: as articulate and tough-talking as a adult but with none of the natural vulnerability of a child.
There is one standout performance: Patricia Clarkson as Violet, the evil dowager. She is pure evil, which is disappointing, as I said. Her corrupt actions don't even end with deploying a nephew who is in Parliament to pass an eminent domain bill that allows her to simply claim the old house from Florence. But she comes to life in the scene where Bill Nighy arrives at her manse to tell her to back off from Florence, because Clarkson delivers a master class in film acting. Before admitting him, she pauses for just a few seconds to prepare her reaction. There is no dialog-- i.e., elemental cinema. She merely stands, her beatific smile tinged with smugness, as she rehearses the ever-so-delicate gestures she will use on him-- a dismissive tilt of the head, an almost imperceptible shrug of one shoulder. Violet is revealed, so cold it gave me chills. An exquisite display of film as a visual medium.