C-

Having failed miserably as an actress in her father’s
“Godfather III” (1990), Sofia Coppola has now persuaded the
old man to co-produce her adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’
strange, atmospheric 1993 first novel about five sisters in
a Michigan family of the 1970s who, apparently in reaction to
the alternately clueless and repressive tactics of their
parents, grow increasingly alienated and despondent. Coppola
doesn’t stumble quite so badly here as she did in front of
the camera, but “The Virgin Suicides” is still a rather
stunted and sluggish exercise in style whose sporadically
haunting visual quality doesn’t make up for its shallowness and
ponderous pace.

As in the book, the tale of the unhappy siblings is told in
flashback by a young man (voiced by Giovanni Ribisi) who was
part of a group of neighboring boys fascinated by the girls
and still trying to fathom the reason behind their final
desperate act; the invitation is for us, as members of the
audience, to become equally intrigued by the sad lasses and
similarly puzzled by the outcome of their lives. Thus we
watch as the sisters are strictly treated by their wimp of
a dad, a math teacher played by James Woods, and their
religiously-obsessed harridan of a mother (Kathleen Turner, not
as overwrought as in “Serial Mom” but not far behind, either),
and make their first, tentative moves toward puppy-love. In
particular we see the most prominent of the girls, Lux (Kirsten
Dunst) get involved with campus heartthrob Trip Fontaine
(Josh Hartnett), a dalliance which leads to increased parental
rigor and the eventual dark tragedy.

The problem isn’t that Coppola has trashed the source material;
it’s that she has treated it with excessive reverence. One
constantly gets the feeling that what one’s watching might
work perfectly well on the printed page, but hasn’t been very
successfully re-imagined in cinematic terms. Everything seems
to move with undue deliberation, pregnant with meaning that’s
never made clear or even reasonably compelling. The picture
just ambles along with little apparent point, on its way to a
denouement that has no real surprise and no larger impact.

The cast works hard to realize Coppola’s vision, but they’re
cramped by the plot and the director’s unsubtle treatment.
Woods plays a nebbish nicely, and Turner tries to restrain her
broader thespic instincts. Dunst is alluring and vaguely
provocative as the rebellious Lux, and Hartnett strikes the
right pose of arrogant bell-bottomed machismo as her drug-
addled date. (It’s nice to see the young actor out of his
usual rebel-without-a-comb scruffy hairdo, incidentally, even
if the wig he’s forced to wear is distinctly unflattering.)
The remaining young performers are all good enough without
being especially memorable. Danny DeVito and Scott Glenn
appear briefly in cameos as a unperceptive shrink and a
well-meaning priest; neither makes much of an impression.

You can appreciate the obvious dedication and respect for its
source that went into the making of “The Virgin Suicides.”
But that can’t disguise the fact that the picture as a whole is
a pretty flat, desultory affair. Still, it’s not bad enough
to close off a directorial future for Sofia Coppola, as
“The Godfather III” rightly did her acting career.

C-

The debut film by noted stage director Deborah Warner opens
with a scene designed to be alluring and somehow magical. Two
figures–a British army officer, dressed in World War I
uniform, and a girl in a billowing white dress dance down a
tree-shrouded lane. Behind them runs a private, carrying an
old phonograph which is playing the music the couple is
cavorting to.

The only problem, of course, is that the sequence immediately
strikes one as impossible. If the phonograph were being
carried so cavalierly as the picture shows, the needle
wouldn’t stay anywhere near the grooves, and what one would
actually hear is a series of dreadful scratches rather than
the happy melodies which sound sweetly on the soundtrack.

A small point, perhaps, but characteristic–because “The Last
September” expends so much effort looking good and creating a
dreamy atmosphere that its makers seem not to care much about
maintaining narrative coherence or building any emotional
resonance.

The tale, based on a novel by the once highly-regarded
Elizabeth Bowen, is one of those “end of an era” stories about
a semi-aristocratic family forced to cope with the fact that
their privileged and beautiful way of life is coming to a close.
In this case the family is an Anglo-Irish one on a lush estate
in southern Ireland, headed by patriarch Richard Naylor (Michael
Gambon) and his wife Lady Myra (Maggie Smith); the year is
1920, when British Prime Minister David Lloyd George is
arranging the partition of the island which will result in the
birth of the Republic and the passing of the English-based but
culturally Irish ruling class the Naylors represent. The
estate is cluttered with assorted members of the clan: the
handsome but apparently penniless Hugo (Lambert Wilson) and
his British wife (Jane Birkin); Myra’s nephew (Jonathan
Slinger); old family friend Marda (Fiona Shaw), who’s been
carrying a torch for Hugo for many years; and, most importantly,
Richard’s orphaned niece Lois (Keeley Hawes), a 19-year old on
the edge of womanhood who’s torn between her affection for
British Captain Gerald Colthurst (David Tennant) and her
obsession with a Irish terrorist (Gary Lydon).

It’s on Lois’ romantic entanglements, with their obvious
political overtones, that the plot concentrates. Her uncertain
twisting between the proper soldier and the brutal but
charismatic Irishman resembles a Jane Austen story ripped
from its Napoleonic wars context and reassembled a century
later, without much success. As for the broader canvas against
which the romantic turmoil is set, it’s difficult to rouse
much sympathy for the Naylors and their friends, who come
across (despite being played by such able performers as Smith,
Gambon, Shaw, Birkin and Wilson) as a bunch of lazy layabouts
revelling aimlessly in lives of unearned wealth and thoughtless
indolence. Why we should care if they lose the privileges
that allow them to exploit their Irish neighbors is never
examined.

“The Last September” is visually interesting, with nice
cinematography by Slawomir Idziak (“The Double Life of
Veronique”), and the score by Zbigniew Preisner is fine, too.
But despite Warner’s talent and the efforts of a talented cast,
it resembles nothing more than a mediocre episode of
“Masterpiece Theatre.”