Butler's Cinema Scene

Emily Mortimer

“THE BOOKSHOP” My rating: B

113 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

“The Bookshop” is an insidious bit of bait and switch.

As it starts out a viewer is confident that he or she is entering familiar territory.  In 1959 a war widow opens a bookshop in  picturesque British coastal town.

So this is going to be a feel-good movie about the power of literature to illuminate gray lives, right? And the lady storeowner will undoubtedly find romance with one of the locals…maybe a handsome fisherman?

Also, our  heroine sells controversial books like Nabokov’s Lolita. So the film will depict the conflict between the local blue noses and everybody else’s right to read, eh?

Uh, no.

Isabel Coixet’s film, adapted from Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, is much darker than that.  Here the common man is something less than noble and the good guys shouldn’t expect to win.

All might have gone swimmingly had Florence Green (Emily Mortimer) not chosen as the site of her new book shop the long-abandoned  Old House, a historic structure fallen on hard times. She buys the place at bargain prices, installs shelves and orders crates of books.

She hires Christine (Honor Kneafsey), the child of local laborers, as her after-school assistant.

And she cultivates the attentions of the  eccentric  town hermit, Edmund (Bill Nighy), a voracious reader living in a slowly decaying mansion. He’s this movie’s version of Miss Havisham.

Bill Nighy, Patricia Clarkson

But by inhabiting Old House Florence has stepped on the toes of Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson), a member of the local aristocracy who had always planned on turning Old House into a community arts center…although she didn’t lift a finger to make it happen until Florence stepped into the picture.

While the first half of “Bookshop” depicts Florence getting settled in this small community and developing a rapport with Nighy’s Edmund (who speaks in a slow melancholy drawl worthy of Eyore),  the second half unleashes the chilly wrath of Violet, who can pull strings with everyone from the health department (the Old House may not be up to code) to the welfare folk (who claim that by allowing young Christine to work in the shop Florence is violating child labor laws).

In the early stages of the film writer/director Coixet employs an irritating voiceover narration (by an uncredited Julie Christie)…it’s one of those maddening instances where the narration explains when we can see for ourselves.  But even that pays off in the end when we finally learn exactly who this unseen narrator is.

Beautifully lensed and nicely acted, “The Bookshop” isn’t exactly a happy movie…but it’s a quietly compelling one.

| Robert W. Butler