Very loosely based on Far From the Madding Crowd, Stephen Frears’ Tamara Drewe is Thomas Hardy twice-filtered: first through the skeptical-sympathetic eye of the terrific British graphic novelist Posy Simmonds, who specializes in placing a contemporary spin on literary classics — her previous strip-novel was Gemma Bovery — and now by Frears, who translates Tamara into live action and retools the novel as a sex comedy.
Quite rightly, too, up to a point. Were he around for red-carpet duties, Hardy would surely enjoy the social satire in this nimble skewering of the English urboisie, seen here misbehaving wildly in the pastoral glades of deepest Dorset. And given his deep appreciation for firm young flesh, the author of Tess of the d’Urbervilles would doubtless admire the flaunted bod of Bond girl Gemma Arterton, who’s frisky in the title role as a homely former bumpkin freshly plasticated into a new identity as a foxy, all-about-moi columnist for a tony London newspaper — though I’m less sure that Hardy would climb on board with the decision to iron most of the tragedy out of the original.
On its own terms, Tamara Drewe is a hugely exuberant black comedy, unfolding over four scenic seasons at a writer’s retreat set in a rose-strewn village overrun by city bobos in search of authenticity. An assortment of deluded twits labors over less than lambent prose, clucked over by Beth — the excellent theater actress Tamsin Greig — who’s the strenuously organic, slightly dowdy wife of Nicholas, a bombastic crime writer and serial philanderer played by Roger Allam (last seen as Helen Mirren’s kilted retainer in The Queen).
When Nicholas’s latest conquest — the titular Tamara, newly nosed and a vision in bum-hugging shorts — shows up, ostensibly to renovate her late mother’s house, the stage is set for a carnal roundelay that leaves almost no one in this quarrelsome collective (including some choice Buff Orpington chickens) unscathed. “I didn’t know they provided material too,” smirks one aspiring writer as the entire corpus witnesses a knock-down fight between Beth and Nicholas over his latest amorous betrayal.
Frears is always at his best making comic hay out of dark material. If The Grifters, The Snapper and The Queen were his finest films, Tamara Drewe is surely his most entertaining, and all the better for its setting on home turf — territory Frears understands a lot better than he did, alas, the milieu of The Hi-Lo Country.
