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English Lyt 101

Emma Thompson dogs Jonathan Pryce in 'Carrington'

By Richard von Busack

A tale of hopeless love among the literati, Carrington provides Emma Thompson with a grand, Oscar-bait role as the painter Dora Carrington, who was the lifelong companion of Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), influential critic, historian and homosexual. Carrington and Strachey were all part of the Bloomsbury tangle, probably what the late, lamented Kingsley Amis was referring to in Lucky Jim when Dixon tells a woman, "I know you're all frightfully keen on marrying men you don't like."

Strachey was the author of the must-read 1918 Eminent Victorians, a revisionist biography of four monumental personalities. It's a very modern read, written by someone who retained--unlike so many other moderns now--the hope that logic would save the world.

In the directorial debut effort by the writer Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons), Strachey makes an unlikely hero. Jonathan Pryce (Brazil) plays him as a frail, tweedy, vegetating critic with a huge muff of a beard. Carrington, who preferred to be addressed by her last name, is here smitten abjectly, realizing that she loves Strachey even as she tries to literally beard him in his den with a pair of scissors. (It is her way of punishing the author for his impulsively stealing a kiss.)

A friend of Carrington's suitor, Mark (Rufus Sewell), Strachey is inveigled into persuading the painter to surrender her virginity to the younger man. The awful sex that results convinces Carrington to live in a chaste menage with Strachey--even as she eventually marries and takes lovers, none of whom can touch her soul as much as the fussy critic.

"Discretion is not the better part of biography," Strachey once said, and Hampton avoids lionizing the characters. The movie takes their various affairs seriously even while underscoring just exactly how unlikely Strachey was. (The "diseased old bugger," as he referred to himself, was "a martyr to the piles" who traveled with an inflatable rubber donut.)

It's a pleasure to see Thompson in a beautiful, affecting performance, even if she is nobody's plain, wistful androgyne. Still, her years as a comic actor serve Thompson well for the farce of giving yourself up to anyone with such abandon ("I'm your pen wiper," she tells Strachey). The moral (voiced by Strachey), that by its very nature an ideal can't exist, is suggested rather than shouted.

Carrington goes against the grain of most biographies of artists and men of letters: directors tend to get uncomfortable in the presence of greatness. Strachey's own niche as a writer is just the right size for a first-rate, understated movie, set in lovely English countryside--a comedy with a tragedy in its center.

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Carrington (R; 123 min.), directed and written by Christopher Hampton, photographed by Denis Lenoir and starring Jonathan Pryce and Emma Thompson.


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