MOLL FLANDERS
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
(MGM) Starring: Robin Wright, Morgan Freeman, Stockard Channing, John Lynch, Aisling Corcoran. Screenplay: Pen Densham. Producers: Pen Densham, Richard B. Lewis, John Watson. Director: Pen Densham. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
If you're looking for a textbook example of counter-programming, you would have to say that MGM's release of MOLL FLANDERS qualifies...either that, or a textbook example of complete stupidity. June is supposed to be the exclusive domain of sequels, special effects and super-stars; films based on period novels are not supposed to appear until the kids are back in school, the leaves have changed colors and the air is heady with Oscar talk. Nevertheless, here we have a romance with English accents taking on Cruise, Connery and Carrey. It's a risky move, but one which could pay off, because MOLL FLANDERS is a solid drama with a top-notch cast, and gives Robin Wright a break-out role to show off her talents.
The film, based on Daniel Defoe's novel, opens with a man named Hibble (Morgan Freeman) showing up at a London orphanage to collect a young girl named Flora (Aisling Corcoran). Hibble tells the girl that he knew her mother, and begins to read to her from the woman's memoir as they make their way to their destination. It tells of Moll Flanders (Robin Wright), the daughter of a woman hung for thievery just after her birth, raised by nuns in a foundling's home. When she runs away from the home, she is taken in first by a society family, and then by the bold and cruel Mrs. Allworthy (Stockard Channing). She soon discovers that Mrs. Allworthy runs a brothel, and eventually joins the profession herself, subsequently sinking into alcoholism. But when an impoverished artist (John Lynch) takes Moll in to be a model, she slowly begins to recover her sense of self, and to learn about true love.
Pen Densham oversees a marvelous look for the production of MOLL FLANDERS, and that look helps to make a fitful first half easier to take. Densham's screenplay often seems in too big a hurry to race through Moll's early life and get her to Mrs. Allworthy's, and he doesn't always allow the significance of certain events to become clear. The greatest charms in that first half are provided by Freeman and Corcoran, who share some frisky scenes as the no-nonsense manservant and his mischievous charge; those scenes provide welcome comic relief. Making your way through MOLL FLANDERS can be like the experience of reading the novel in a high school English class -- the early exposition can lose you before you get to the meat of the story.
I would hope that such is not the case, because MOLL FLANDERS becomes an extremely effective and satisfying love story, and because even in that sluggish first hour Robin Wright turns in a wonderful performance. Despite her delicate features, Wright can make herself appear amazingly solid and determined, and that is a critical facet of the personality she is trying to convey. This is a story about the inner strength of a woman who struggles against the life to which she was born towards her vision of the life she believes she deserves, and Wright makes that journey as touching as it is painful. She has a superb partner in John Lynch, who provides gently shaded work as the frustrated artist-cum-scientist whose search for the ability to commit a soul to canvas helps Moll to re-discover her own soul. There is a completely natural chemistry between them, and their relationship makes the second half of MOLL FLANDERS something special.
Densham's erratic sense of pacing does undercut the love story somewhat, as MOLL FLANDERS never quite achieves the big, cathartic emotional moments one expects from a story of this kind. I think that he also doesn't allow Freeman or Stockard Channing to do the best work of which they are capable. Freeman may be the best American screen actor of the moment, but he never quite finds the character of the emotionally enslaved Hibble, and Channing similarly wavers between a kind of one-dimensional Victorian villainy and a kinder, gentler side. By driving his story towards the relationship between Moll and the artist, Densham has sacrificed certain aspects of the story, but he makes that sacrifice pay off. What really makes MOLL FLANDERS work, in a way that the recent JANE EYRE didn't, is that Densham maintains a fundamental sense of optimism and energy, relegating the sense of loss and foreboding which could have dominated the story to a secondary status. MOLL FLANDERS is a redemption story, and it is an effective one. It is also a human story, and that alone may help it to stand out while every theater around it reverberates with tornadoes and explosions.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Defoe recitations: 7.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
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