Words, words, words: Novels, especially 19th-century ones, are full of the damned things, which can be an inconvenience for filmmakers doing adaptations.
Directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, theater veterans making their cinematic debut with Bel Ami, try to downplay language, which seems a promising idea. But the strategy fails for several reasons, the foremost of which is their leading man.
Twilight franchise player Robert Pattinson plays the title character in the latest movie based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1885 tale. Georges Duroy, soon dubbed “Bel Ami” by the daughter of one of his aristocratic lovers, is a man of little promise. A former cavalry officer in Algeria, he lives in a garret and works as a clerk. Then a chance encounter with an old army colleague leads him to unexpected success in a field for which he’s utterly unqualified: journalism.
Words, again. Georges can’t write a decent sentence, but he becomes the instrument of his old cohort’s wife: Madeleine Forestier (Uma Thurman) uses the young man to indulge literary gifts that she, as a respectable woman, cannot openly showcase.
It’s a useful alliance that expands when Madeleine, after being widowed, agrees to wed Georges. But theirs is not a marriage of true minds. Actually, Georges barely seems to have an intellect.