So sorry is that not-not enough? Here. I’ve got more.
*GASP*
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Hello my beautiful watchers. Let's talk about this new Rebecca shall we? I have thoughts.
This isn’t an official Lost in Adaptation but I’ll
mostly be talking about how it ties into the book because that’s just
how I do. I started this show because that's where my mind always goes when I watch films like this.
Rebecca the book is a psychological gothic thriller authored by english
writer Daphne du Maurier and published in 1938 to critical acclaim and commercial success.
2 years later in 1940 Alfred Hitchcock made his debut in american filmmaking by directing a
silver screen adaptation of Rebecca starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine and Judith
Anderson that was equally well received, winning an Academy Award for Best Picture.
In 2017 I made an episode of Lost in Adaptation comparing the two.
It's an ok episode I guess, I hate watching my old stuff but people seem to enjoy it.
Aaaand now in the year of our lord 2020 Netflix has chosen to take its own shot
at bringing Rebecca to life and..it's not very good as an adaptation OR a stand alone film.
It stars Lily James, Armie Hammer and Dame Kristin Scott Thomas in the three main roles.
Ok here's the very basic story of the book,
I went into a lot more detail in the other episode if you crave more.
A young naive and exceptionally timid woman you never learn the name of,
henceforth referred to as the lead marries a grumpy but handsome and insanely rich
older man called Maxim de Winter who lives in a famously amazing and beautiful estate in England.
All is not well though because Maxim, his family, the staff at Manderley and
basically everyone in the surrounding village seems to be still be SUPER
hung up on Maxim’s one year deceased first wife Rebecca.
In particular the housekeeper Mrs Danvers who takes a massive dislike to the lead for daring
to try to fill Rebecca's shoes and spends the next few months being hostile to her,
sabotaging her marriage and manipulating her into situations to make her suicidally miserable.
Eventually Rebecca's body is unexpectedly discovered and Maxim confesses to his new
wife that she was not as perfect as everyone believed and was in fact an
abusive serial adulterer who he murdered in a crime of passion.
This inspires the lead to spontaneously grow a backbone and she commits to trying
to keep Maxin away from prison and/or execution.
There's an investigation and Maxim is almost found out,
but at the last minute in a lucky twist of fate it turns out there's evidence
that Rebecca was dying of cancer so her mysterious death is deemed a suicide.
As there's nothing else Mrs Danvers can do to punish her beloved Rebecca’s killer
she burns down Manderley and runs away. The end.
Just on the film side of things one of the few redeeming features is its
very visually pleasing, they really utilized the beautiful
natural landscapes and buildings of south Britain to great effect.
Dame Kristin was I think the only person who managed to make the most out of the role she
was given and Lily James was fine, I think her biggest hindrance was that her character was
intentionally written to have very little personality of her own for most of the story.
However things are dragged down a lot by the male lead. Even taking into account that
Laurence Olivier is an almost comically hard act to follow I still feel Armie
Hammer delivered a shockingly monotone and charisma-free performance as Maxim de Winter.
I don’t think I’ve seen anything else he’s been in so I don’t know if this is usual for him
or if trying to maintain the english accent was throwing off his game but
yeah he was a serious weak link in this film.
As an adaptation Nextflix Rebecca keeps
almost to all of the essential plot beats with only a few major deviations.
There quite a few minor ones, but I think that its main failing is
in the characterizations of almost every important player.
If I were to pick one thing I think summarizes Rebecca 2020
it would be Maxim de Winter is young, shredded and horny.
The significant age gap between them is now non existent as they’re both in their early 30s and
they are waaaaay more “affectionate” towards each other than they ever were in the book.
There really wasn’t any physical contact between them described originally due to a combination
of Maxim being permanently distant from the lead and the book being written in 1930 when so much
as kissing your wife on the cheek in public was considered highly inappropriate in high society.
This leads me to my next issue with the film, when they first announced this new adaptation
I wondered if they were planning on modernising it or if they were going to put the extra work in to
stick to the original timer period, and the answer turned out to be kinda both.
By that I mean they kept the 1930s setting but most of the characters
act like they’re from the present with all our modern behaviours and relative inhibitions.
They seemed to be intent on villanising Mrs Van Hopper, the lead’s employer at
the start of the story which I don’t know seems a little unnecessary to me. She was a
vain and self absorbed woman to be sure but she was never cruel in the book.
There's already a prominent evil older woman in the story so I’m not sure why
they felt we needed another one to keep us going until she shows up.
Jack Fervell, the slimiest of gits in the novel honestly comes off a little sympathetic in this,
though I don’t know if that was intentional. He seems genuinely upset when he finds out
Rebeca may have been pregnant with his child when she was murdered.
Though they also slipped in a somewhat gratuitous scene of him groping the lead which I
really could have done without.
The film fails to really impart just how
utterly perfect Rebecca had seemed to be to literally everyone who had ever met her and
as a result the lead’s paranoia and obsessive behaviour towards her lacks a lot of nuance.
It looks like they might’ve become aware of this during production because they
eventually give up on subtlety in building this plot and resort to a dream sequence
where everyone stands around the Lead chanting Rebecca’s name while she pulls horrified faces.
Netflix ends up making the same mistake that Hichock did but making it much much worse,
namely they couldn’t resist making Maxim more likeable, and the lead more self
confident before the big reveal about what Rebecca was really like and how she died.
I cannot overstate how much of a linchpin moment that was in the book’s plot.
It was the game changing event that redefined everything and removed the
shadow from their marriage and gave the lead the confidence she needed to stand
up for herself and stop defining herself as Rebecca’s not as good replacement.
In a way it's when the book stops being about Rebecca and really becomes the Lead’s story.
But the film includes moments of unmistakable backbone from the lead
from the start as she gets the last word in with Mrs Van Hopper and
attempts to dismiss Mrs Danvers, forcing her to appeal to her sympathy to avoid it.
Combine this with Maxim being kind and affectionate to her right from the get
go and the paradigm shift before and after the big plot twist is way less defined and
the pinnacle moment is greatly diminished.
Mrs Danvers is occasionally brought up in discussions of gay coded villans because of
the different ways her neblus relationship with Rebecca has been interpreted over the years,
my personal feeling from the novel was that her love for her was strictly maternal,
but there was definitely more overtones of a sexual nature in the Hitchcock adaptation.
I’m not always the best judge of this stuff because I’m disturbingly blind to subtext and
symbolism but it looks to me like Netflix dropped this angle and returned to the original
adoptive daughter version of their relationship.
They do however follow Hichcock's example and kill her off at the end, which as I mentioned
in the Lost in Adaptation episode was probably a demand from the Hays code to bury your gays.
Instead of having the personality of a baby doormouse the lead in this film is more of the
flustered, awkward and clumsy type which as you saw is one of the things that gave me
DISTURBING Fifty Shades of Grey vibes along with the montage of holiday activities.
The book Rebecca was unmistakably an influence for Fifty Shades, and
by influence I of course I mean EL James ripped entire sections off wholesale. What few plot
points couldn’t be traced to Twilight were very clearly derivative of du Maurier’s book.
I know this because EL James openly flaunted her plagiarism by copy pasting the first page of
Rebecca into one of the sequel books as Anna reads it and tries to draw comparisons to her own life.
I cannot express how horrified I am that the influence might have come full circle.
I was hoping they would at least have the balls to have Maxim be a cold blooded killer again
now that there was no need to appease the wretched motion picture production code and
they sorta did but also tried to weasel out of it a bit.
The scene is a little hard to follow because it's not instantly clear if Maxim is just recreating
what happened with Rebbeca, trying to get his new wife to shoot him in the same way or both
but it seems that Rebecca handed him the gun and goaded him into pulling the trigger.
Don’t get me wrong in the book it was very likely she WAS trying to get Maxim
to kill her to avoid her impending slow death and ruin him as a bonus,
but having her literally load the gun and cock it for him does reduce Maxim’s
guilt as much as possible without ditching the plot point altogether.
What I consider to be the biggest deviation from the original plot
is the way that the investigation into Maxim de Winter goes down.
First of all Maxim concedes to Fervell’s blackmail
attempt instead of calling his bluff in a incredible display of stubborn pride,
then unlike in the book where he’s treated like royalty throughout the whole affair
because he’s mad rich and personal friends with the head of the local police force,
making it clear the only thing that could get him in trouble is indisputable damning evidence, this
film explicitly says in the dialogue that no one is above the law and he gets locked up for a bit.
Instead of just being helplessly swept along with things in the end of the story,
the Lead now goes completely rogue and breaks into the doctor’s office
with the intention of destroying evidence but gets caught in the act.
However the final plot twist that Rebecca had a terminal illness remains the same
so her new, more empowered actions don’t ultimately have any effect on the story.
Is ALMOST doing something more feminist?
The film ends on a positive note, making it clear the lead and Maxin
are still happily bonking all over the world post Manderly’s destruction,
unlike the book which opens with the forewarning that not many years later Maxin’s mental health
unexpectedly degrades and the lead ends up as his full time carer.
FYI when the lead was chasing after Mrs Danvers at the end I was like:
“holy shit is this version going to end with an epic clifftop battle?
I mean it will be hella off book but I kinda wanna see it now.”
I was pleased to see at least the iconic dress incident and the following attempt
from Mrs Davers to talk the lead into jumping out of the window,
interrupted by a boat crash was pretty much book accurate
though I couldn’t help but compare it to how much more effective it was in the 1940 version.
Rebbeca never directly appearing in the story even in flashbacks or photgraphs
is somewhat integral I think and I’m trying to decide...
If the brief shot of her submerged skeletal corpse counts. Weird decision either way.
In conclusion I think the main reason this adaptation fails hard
is well..Rebecca the book is a story about very very flawed people,
so much so that you would be forgiven for being unsure who were the real villains at the end,
and the makers of this film just didn’t seem willing to commit to these flawed characters.
The lead is less of a pushover, Maxim is less of an arsehole,
even the titular Rebecca is less of an overwhelming presence.
It's almost like the guys who made it are under the impression this is a
romance story instead of a gothic horror thriller.
The end result is just dull and lifeless. It lacks almost all the gravitas of the book and
the intensity of the Hickcock movie. Not the worst thing I’ve ever seen but it's
already slipping from my memory, give it a few more days and to me it will be
like it never existed which is almost worse than being remembered for being terrible.
I’m curious to know if anyone else had a different reaction to it, especially
if you haven't read the book because I’m aware that my inescapable fixation on the
adaptation side of things can sometimes overwhelm my overall opinion. If you liked this film just as
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