Gillian Armstrong's Schmaltzy, Soulless Charlotte Gray

Lines outside a neighborhood theater showing Gosford Park have been steady?and unusual. Each time I pass by, the ticket buyers mostly appear to be over 30. Since Hollywood's post-Star Wars capitulation to the toy market, new movies commonly attract young viewers to the point that typical rambunctious movie queues resemble the crowds in front of a freak show tent, waiting to be scandalized. The indication that Gosford Park finally offers entertainment worthy of adult attention restores the idea that movies might, once again, be a truly popular art. However, seeing such lines outside Charlotte Gray would crush one's enthusiasm. Gillian Armstrong's story of World War II espionage is a bogus adult drama?it reverses the phenomenon of youth exploitation.

In Charlotte Gray's opening sequence, swoony music and darkly lush photography are accompanied by Cate Blanchett's introductory narration, "Looking back it all seemed so simple." It's like Gladys Knight's version of "The Way We Were," but with ersatz soul. Blanchett and Armstrong are asking viewers to get nostalgic for no reason except commercial convenience.

Charlotte Gray presents an antiquated narrative style that might seem reassuring to some simply because it is never challenging. Unlike Gosford Park, it primarily serves a reactionary function, giving audiences schmaltz as an alternative to contemporary movie noise and excitation. But without a sense of humor?or emotional honesty?nothing in Armstrong's filmmaking revises how viewers respond to a familiar genre. There's an infuriating presumption of superiority in the way Armstrong (frequently labeled a feminist filmmaker) embraces the tropes of chick flicks?as if her 2001 blatancy about a feisty young woman was somehow more empowering than old-time Hollywood suds.

Blanchett plays the title role of a Scots woman living in 1942 London who, during the Blitz, falls in love with a poster-boy RAF pilot (Rupert Penry-Jones). When the pilot's plane goes down across the channel, Charlotte enlists ("to be an agent or courier," she says matter of factly) and becomes "Dominque," a WWII spy.

Charlotte's exploits in France, including falling in love with Resistance leader Julien Levade, played by Billy Crudup, are overly familiar. Her relations with female friends or men are not evocative (like, say, Muriel Spark's period story Girls of Slender Means) or much advanced from a Nancy Drew novel. Based on romantic fiction by Sebastian Faulks, these grownup characters don't make Charlotte Gray a grownup story. It's yet another movie that treats the audience as teenagers by eliciting mushy, love-story identification with Charlotte/Dominque, who never acquires a single political notion. Armstrong's emphasis on the romantic motivations behind Charlotte's actions goes on to confuse female-fiction prerogative with bravery. This may seem a deliberate throwback to a 1940s women's picture, but it's actually far less intricate or emotionally specific than a good melodrama like Mitchell Leisen's 1946 Olivia de Havilland vehicle To Each His Own?which holds up today for its now newly appreciable details about sacrifice and duty. (Its essence is more relevant after 9/11 than the jingoistic Black Hawk Down.) Film scholar Jack Shadoian once acknowledged that Leisen and de Havilland weren't simply playing out gay male/feminist biases (though they might have been); they submerged their imaginations into a story of how a woman gained humanity from a history of personal hardships before and after wartime.

Blanchett's no 40s-style diva. Her concurrent appearances in Charlotte Gray, The Shipping News and Lord of the Rings simply make her the most blandly versatile actress of the season. And though glamorously made-up, costumed and lighted (by Dion Beebe), Blanchett yet has a stolid, modern bearing that only makes Charlotte Gray seem more unbelievable. Armstrong's insistence on constructing a war heroine, then resorting to hearts-and-flowers sentimentality, is just flatulent feminism. For its two-hour length it isn't as credible or revealing as the Alan Bates subplot of Gosford Park, which quickly, movingly conveyed the ambivalence and anguish of a conscientious objector suffering social disgrace. Charlotte Gray's entirety is worse than the misleading Gosford Park tv ads that distort Altman's social scrutiny into another Murder by Death (Neil Simon's 1976 Agatha Christie parody).

Charlotte Gray is, unintentionally, a parody?of adult emotion, of political intrigue, of the moral crises that arose during WWII and finally of adult sophistication. Its imitation of Golden Age filmmaking is just hollow mannerism. Armstrong's highly picturesque style is, ironically, flighty. She lacks the 40s filmmaker's craft?the way a Leisen or David Lean knew to make details momentous so that the visual experience of a beautifully shot film was analogous to sharing the emotional/spiritual life of the characters. In place of spiritual inquiry, Armstrong and screenwriter Jeremy Brock provide Holocaust merchandising?a cheap way of making a trite movie seem serious. Charlotte's always outwitting Nazis or collaborators, until Nazis invade the farm where Julien Levade's father (Michael Gambon) is hiding two Jewish orphans. To appease the Gestapo, Julien must make a Sophie's choice?give up the boys or his own father?which the filmmakers blithely sanction and then impute dubious heroics to Charlotte. (As Nazis take him away, the father cries out for Charlotte, not his son.) This moralistic twaddle is every bit as phony as Jim Carrey and Frank Darabont's The Majestic, but not as innocent.

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Armstrong's feminist update of the 40s chick flick?romantic shlock with a martyrdom complex?patronizes adult sensibility. Charlotte Gray is bloated with easy satisfactions aimed at viewers and critics who think it's part of a great tradition, but it's kid's stuff?and that's what reigns at the movies. Look at the media enthusiasm for Lord of the Rings, a stultifying degradation of fantasy filmmaking that peaked with Excalibur (John Boorman retold the Arthurian legend with an adult mastery that could, in fact, inspire young viewers to want to grow up and gain sophistication?along with sexual license). Our current culture panders to youth so entirely that films like LOTR (best pigeonholed as frivolity for short-fries) is widely endorsed. Most media exists to create teenage consumers, but by extolling LOTR it opposes Boorman's art?the media condescends to youth taste, enshrining adolescent sensibility and promoting prosaic fantasy as if it were the acme of creativity. Great kinetic pop films like the Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park series never received the acclaim given LOTR. Their art was intimidating?too much fun?for dull minds to appreciate. LOTR lovers have met their intellectual level in Peter Jackson's plodding fantasias. (Ray Harryhausen's time has finally come as boomer critics praise Jackson for emulating the scary monsters and superfreaks Harryhausen produced in their youth.) This same escapist esthetic was proclaimed with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Charlotte Gray is just a matinee-ladies variation. Appealing to childish taste is worse than unserious?it rejects meaning and complexity. You have to fight for your right to be an adult at today's movies.