Peter Canavese
2002-07-09 00:21:00 UTC
Charlotte Gray is one of those odd-duck historical fiction films that ignores the scintillating truth and instead spins a frustrating web of simplistic half-truths. With the appropriate panache, audiences won't necesarily care, and director Gillian Armstrong comes close to that mark. Unfortunately, neither she nor star Cate Blanchett can overcome the sogginess that seeps into this curious venture.
Blanchett plays the titular agent for Britain's WWII Special Operations Executive, an undercover outfit serving the allied war effort through smuggling and communications. She finds herself in this curious position after the airman she loves (Rupert Penry Jones) opens up her world (so to speak). Alive with the possibility of making something of herself by serving the war effort, Charlotte becomes doubly motivated when her man disappears behind enemy lines. Fancying that she can save him, she volunteers to spy in France, only to botch her mission from the get-go. Sent by French resistance leader Julien (Billy Crudup) to live in the country with his father (lower-crusty Michael Gambon) and two refugee Jewish boys, Charlotte continues to wreak deadly mayhem upon her own side.
Picturesque (perhaps to a fault) and concerned at least as much with romance as war, the film manages only spurts of suspense and essentially lacks spark. Blanchett, Crudup, and Gambon are all exceptional talents, but all fail to overcome the clunky material, which hardly rings with truth. This tower-of-Babel U.K.-Australia production shot on location in France, England and Scotland delivers iffy accents from a Brit playing a Scot playing a Frenchwoman, numerous Brits playing Frenchmen, and an American playing French, all in English, of course (only the Germans are subtitled). Credit is due to the handsome production for facing up to the unfortunate French collaboration, but the numerous victims of Gray's mistakes die for her romantic fantasy, which seems neither credible nor tasteful.
Given the remarkable exploits of many real female SOE agents, it's difficult to understand why Charlotte Gray must be depicted as such a miserably failed spy, other than to put Blanchett through old-fashioned, swooning, big-screen torture. Despite the insistence of Armstrong and Blanchett that this role is a truly great (and rare) one for a modern actress, it's actually a retro dishonor to the real women of the SOE. Still, there's a perverse curiosity to the palindromic theme that, though the most trivial of human acts can spell disaster in wartime, the despairing tragedies of war may best be answered by the smallest of humane gestures. Any way you look at it, Charlotte Gray depicts the most pyrrhic spy victory this side of Get Smart.
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