Hasty Decision
FILM: Dreaming of Joseph Lees
DIRECTOR: Eric Styles
STARRING: Samantha Morton, Rupert Graves
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SHE MUST BE DREAMING: EVA (SAMANTA MORTON) DECIDES TO SHACK UP WITH HARRY
RATHER THAN PURSUE JOSEPH, HER TRUE LOVE.
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Eric Styles' Dreaming of Joseph Lees offers the advantage of another
occasion to see the work of the remarkable Samantha Morton amid the
considerable disadvantage of a screenplay almost utterly opaque about its
characters' emotional motivations. Written by Catherine Linstrum, Dreaming
of Joseph Lees is an original script that plays like a badly adapted novel.
We keep thinking that something must be lost in the condensation.
This picture is the story of Eva (Morton), a small-town British
lass with an anachronistically independent turn of mind. The era is never
precisely identified, but we're presumably in the late 1920s or early '30s. Eva
is twentysomething, and she still lives at home with her father (Frank Finlay).
She's still girlish enough to sometimes squabble childishly with her pubescent
sister, Janie (Lauren Richardson), with whom she is otherwise cuddly and
affectionate. Eva takes art classes and evinces a dreamy intellectualism that
suggests a strain of professional ambition, but she works as a clerk at a
lumber company and sometimes hangs around with a marginally literate woman
named Maria (Holly Aird).
Eva seems paradoxical in any number of ways, none more so than in
her romantic life. We know from the early going that she's infatuated with her
second cousin, Joseph Lees (Rupert Graves), a geologist who has traveled widely
and recently was injured while doing research in Italy. Eva steadfastly denies
her feelings for Joseph, however, and he, among everyone else other than Janie,
remains ignorant of them. A family funeral provides an occasion when Eva and
Joseph might interact, but for reasons as clear as a cup of espresso, her
father doesn't allow her to attend. Thereafter, Eva seems to put Joseph out of
her mind as if he is utterly unattainable. And all in a moment she agrees to
get horizontal and cohabitate with Harry (Lee Ross), a pig farmer who lives on
an isolated homestead. This seems a quite remarkable decision, because Harry
sports the personality of the icky Horshack from Gabe Kaplan's old Welcome
Back Kotter TV show.
Eva reminds me of Faye Dunaway's character from Chinatown:
"She's my sister; she's my daughter." Eva seems always to feel two ways at
once. Harry takes her to a boxing match where she stands ringside as two
bruisers pound the tar out of each other. In the space of a
multiple-personality eyeblink, she's thrilled, and then she's horrified. Eva is
fiercely reluctant to make up her mind until she abruptly decides to do what
she has no business doing and doesn't even want to do. Harry wants Eva, so she
gives herself to him, even though she doesn't love him and knows she never
will. We haven't a clue why she does this, save for the irritating possibility
that she's just determined to have sex with somebody.
Dreaming of Joseph Lees brims with annoyances. The time
period suggests that Eva will be condemned a slut and banished from society,
but she's not even ostracized by her father. Then, if Harry is a farmer, why
does he also seem to work at the lumber yard? If Harry lives so far from town
that Janie can't manage to visit for ages, how does Eva keep her job? Is she
commuting by time machine? When her father won't let Eva attend the funeral, we
think that Joseph must live far, far away because only the occasion of such a
family gathering might allow Eva to meet him. That presumption of great
distance is maintained when a family wedding finally allows the two fated
lovers to come together. But no, Joseph must live within a short walk of that
time machine entrance. For later, Eva is able to travel from Harry's farm to
Joseph's city flat in the space of a single day. And while she stays with
Joseph, she's evidently able to keep that job as clerk at the lumber yard. So
what in the devil has she been dilly dallying about? Joseph is the one she
wants, and he's been almost right at hand all along. But instead of making her
feelings known, she has moved in with Harry. That makes so little sense that
when the movie makes its final turn of tearing Eva between duty (to Harry) and
love (for Joseph), we've lost all our patience. Morton is a brilliant young
performer. But she's no cinematic alchemist, and she can't manage to spin gold
out of straw.
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