COTTON MARY A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 2000 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): **
Set along the Malabar Coast in India in 1954, COTTON MARY is by Merchant-Ivory Productions, a group so famous for costume dramas that they probably hold several patents on the genre. COTTON MARY does a marvelous job of displaying the sights and sounds of the era but a miserable job of doing much more.
At the center of the drama is a chatty, vain and strange woman called Cotton Mary. Mary is played by Madhur Jaffrey as a woman so unlikable that she becomes an obnoxious, cliché of a villain. Wearing her prejudice on her sleeve, Mary hates Indians because she thinks she is better than them since she is Anglo-Indian. "These Indian nurses don't know anything," nurse Mary informs Lily Macintosh (Greta Scacchi), who is having trouble producing any milk for her newborn baby. "I'm half-English!" Mary reassures Lily. Mary is also a thief and a liar, among her other despicable traits.
A sickly and depressed woman, Lily is so out of touch with reality that the story would have us believe that she doesn't even know how her own baby is being fed. The baby's nourishment comes from the breasts of Mary's sister. In an attempt to get her own milk production going, Lily keeps going to her doctor, who tells her that it's all in her mind,.
Lily's husband, John (James Wilby), works as a reporter for the BBC World Service. When his body makes its infrequent appearances at home, his mind remains firmly elsewhere. Even at work, he is just as out to lunch as his wife. When interviewing some poor workers, he tells them he is just like them since his father was a union man. Living a life of luxury with servants, a big house and a private club, he is, of course, nothing at all like them.
After sketching out his characters, writer Alexandra Viets, who based the script on her play, never gets around to filling them in. Director Ismail Merchant stages some lovely scenes of evening festivals but is never able to make up for the lack of a compelling script.
This is the second film in less than a month about the stilted views of Ango-Somethings -- the other was THE LAST SEPTEMBER about the Anglo-Irish. One wonders if this is another one of those cinematic trends that studios seem to love. Are we shortly going to have stories about the Anglo-Africans, the Anglo-Jamaicans, and who knows who else? If we do, let's hope the next one in the series finally finds a script worthy of the subject.
COTTON MARY runs a long 2:03. It is rated R for a scene of sexuality and would be acceptable for teenagers.
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
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