by Nathaniel R
Frances Price, the soon to be impoverished widow at the center of French Exit alarms everyone around her and puts them on edge. She will just not cooperate. Neither will Michelle Pfeiffer, the actress playing her, for that matter. Rather than dance around it, let's just state the conundrum up front. When you're watching your favourite actor star in a potential comeback role based on a book you've grown deeply fond of and have already visualized as a movie in your head, the conflicts between expectations and reality and dreams can be impossible to mediate. And disconcerting, too. You've got to watch the movie for the movie but also work through your own external actress-related issues while doing so.
I obsess over Michelle Pfeiffer, okay?! There's no avoiding it and little point not foregrounding it in this review. Complete strangers know this about me...
Herein lies the catch of loving an actor who rarely works. Every single movie becomes utterly fraught with expectations. It can't just be a hit or miss, like any random project from any busy actor is allowed to be, it has to be 'the one!' because you know she'll vanish again for another three years (apart from tiny roles) as she's done regularly for the past 17 years. All of this is a long way of confessing that I love Michelle Pfeiffer so much that she gives me anxiety when I'm watching her.
It was Frances' shrug that first unnerved me. Near the beginning of French Exit, which wisely cuts right to the chase, she's listening to a financial advisor tell her she's toast. ALL the money is gone. She shrugs and repeats. Shrugs and repeats. The shrug is deeply offputting in its impenetrable defeatism. This woman can't and won't hear any more but Pfeiffer's avoidance is closer to helpless nihilism than the profligate defiance I pictured from Frances while reading. The dissonance alarmed me.
And yet my own reaction, however personal, might well be closer to a general audience's reaction than I would have expected. For Frances is a deeply aggravating woman. She will not bend to society's expectations or your whims or needs, whether or not they're reasonable. And, worse, she'll never question her own, no matter how strange, hypocritical, or destructive. And so Frances and her zombie-like son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges, also much different than any read of the novel) quietly sell everything they have for cash and head off to Paris with their cat Small Frank in tow (he's named after Frances' dead husband). Malcolm and Small Frank blindly follow Frances but Frances move with true unwavering intent; She never plans to return.
Though Patrick deWitt's screenplay, based on his own novel, moves swiftly and is appropriately merciless with itself -- he drops large chunks of the already slim novel as casually as Frances dispenses with big stacks of the only money she has left -- it's hard not to long for some of what's missing. The character of Madeline the psychic (ubiquitous Danielle Macdonald) for example is mostly lost in the transfer as is cool Frances' atypically warm relationship with her best friend Joan (Susan Coyne). One particularly strange choice DeWitt makes is to drop Frances's most prominent verbal tic in the book, a conversation-stopping "that's right" whenever she's questioned as if everyone around her is exceptionally stupid and didn't understand her the first time.
Pfeiffer, always an expert at both ice queens and mordant comedy, plays Frances much warmer than I was expecting which is... a choice I'm eager to revisit to understand. Hedges also makes definitive choices, and though the character is more loveable in this new form, he's simplified. Most of the cast has good fun with their roles but the best among them by a significant margin is the delightful Valerie Mahaffey as the Prices' needy neighbor Mademoiselle Reynard, a British widow living in Paris who is eager to befriend the infamous Frances. The problem is that Frances isn't the sort of woman who is interest in "friendship" or fans. When Frances and Malcolm first visit Reynard, Malcolm makes a startling discovery in her apartment. I shan't spoil the surprise but let's just say that Mahaffey pitches her character comedy so perfectly that you absolutely believe the joke.
The performances, especially Pfeiffer's, will be fun to investigate on a second viewing for their odd turns and possible layers, once those pesky novel-to-film expectations have dissipated, but will the movie itself? I fear not.
French Exit is the kind of film that becomes more and more enjoyable as it goes -- the first half is sluggish but the momentum is real in the second half as things get increasingly odd. Your patience is rewarded. But the large and intractable problem with Azazel Jacobs' adaptation of French Exit lies in its creative modesty. The specifics of the downward spiral plot paired so amusingly with its comically multiplying cast of looney-tunes characters all jammed into one Parisian apart, remain riveting from novel form despite the changes. Sadly, the filmmaking never matches the material, perpetually lagging behind.
Director Azazel Jacobs is good with actors (see also his debut feature The Lovers) but is either unwilling or unable to join the eccentric wavelength of the pitch the material demands. The crafts are competent but perfunctory but this story begs for visual treatment with an actual point of view. Either embrace the morbidity of Frances' fatalism or the farce of the clown-car like apartment, or the contradictions of the material wherein a mother and son behave as if they're still unfathomably wealthy when they're actually living in scarcity. But don't just stand by haplessly while all of that is happening! One solution -- loathe as I am to ever normally suggest it for adaptations-- might have been narration. In this case there's a ready made unexpectedly perfect narrator in Small Frank, who could have effectively retained some of the novel's rich character insights while keeping the tricky tone of mordant fatalism and matter-of-fact comedy more consistent. Why shouldn't a cat serve as deadpan guide, as they're already perfectly inscrutable observers.
Even the two séance scenes in French Exit are played straight and thus feel non-committal, avoiding comedy even though comedy of the ridiculous needn't exclude reality. Only the score, lightly comical but moody, exhibits a personality fit to play with the memorable characters.
Still French Exit is not without considerable redeeming merits. In addition to Pfeiffer's intricate performance, two particular shots from the last act linger in a beautiful way, softer in their sentiment than expected but somehow true to the darker resolutions of the book. In the second séeance sequence Frances abruptly blows out the candles ending the scene with a depressing cut-to-black severity. Séances are generally reserved for reviving the dead but even in this tradition French Exit, like its maddening widow, won't cooperate. Pfeiffer blows out the candles with such fury and abruptnesses it's like she's more eager to cause death than work around it. Later in a magical shot of empty Parisian streets we watch Frances walking away from us, receding. It's not remotely abrupt but the finality stings.
Azazel Jacobs, Lucas Hedges and Michelle Pfeiffer discussing the film with the New York Film Festival over Zoom
Grade: B/B-
Oscar Chances: As much as we'd hoped for Pfeiffer to finally win her long overdue Oscar, French Exit is probably a long shot to accomplish that since it's both eccentric and modestly conceived. But, nevertheless, Sony Pictures Classics will surely mount a worthy campaign even if Best Actress is competitive. Otherwise it's tough to imagine much awards love outside of Pfeiffer's entertaining star turn, even for Mahaffey, as much of a scene-stealer as she is.