Movie Review: Julian Fellowes' Separate Lies - Precisely - Page 4

This is Fellowes's directorial debut, and it's hard to believe this textured, supple drama is the work of the man who wrote the scripts for Robert Altman's Gosford Park (2001) and Mira Nair's Vanity Fair (2004). Vanity Fair, which turns Thackeray's irony into feminist romance, is among the worst botches of literary genre in movie history. As for Gosford Park, the murder mystery it's built around trivializes its pretensions to being a masters-and-servants epic (the weak, anachronistic theatrical in-jokes about the American actor researching his role in a Charlie Chan picture don't help), and its view of those relationships is dismally narrow. The difference among Maggie's relationships with the three main characters in Separate Lies shows what's missing from Gosford Park—the sense that while rigid class lines may separate the English upper classes and their servants, they nonetheless live on terms of intimacy and there is, of course, a wide range of responses within that system. The fundamentally humorless, melodramatic-socialist view of class in Gosford Park is like English country life glimpsed through an iron curtain. (By shaping the miserable revelation of abuse and exploitation to the contrivances of a detective story, Fellowes's script misses the wallop of the mistress-and-servant relationship handled naturalistically by the Goncourts in Germinie Lacerteux.)

There are certain gaps in the storytelling in Separate Lies. It isn't necessarily clear, for example, why Anne married James in the first place, though we see enough to base speculation on (and naturalism is the one genre in which it can make sense to talk about the characters' lives outside what we're told and shown as if they were people). You could also say that James's final transition to acceptance, while not implausible, isn't generated by any action that we see. But these are nothings compared to Fellowes's accomplishment. The material is strictly commonplace—the makings of an episode of a TV detective series—which is always a pitfall for recreations of middle-class life. But Fellowes is so committed to the artistic means of naturalism, and so judicious, that his work is absorbing in a way that movies of broader scope almost never are.

A bit of catnip: Rupert Everett is highly entertaining here despite whatever it is he paid to have done to his face. Click here for before-and-after photos.

You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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