One of the most intoxicating things in life is to watch someone fulfil a long held dream.
Years of quietly-nurtured hopes and expectations have come to fruition and while success is not necessarily guaranteed, the fact that the dream has found its way from the intangible environs of the heart and soul into the big wide world, that its assumed flesh-and-blood form so to speak, is a cause for celebration, riotous or otherwise.
That is, unless of course, you’re Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson), the local lady of the manor, or at least what passes for a manor in the small English seaside town of Hardborough, Suffolk, who is genial and welcoming unless, like Florence Green (Emily Mortimer), you get between her and her seldom-unrealised ambitions.
She is the villain of the piece in Isabel Coixet’s The Bookshop, an adaptation of the book of the same name by Penelope Fitzgerald, opposing at every turn Florence Green’s decision, against considerable, never-openly-stated odds, to open a bookshop in the town’s venerated Old House, for which Violet sees an altogether different role as a vaguely-envisioned arts and cultural centre.
While Florence, still mourning the loss of her husband 16 years previously in World War Two, is looking to the future, selling the scandalous new title “Lolita” and endeavouring to create a literary buzz in a town singularly unenamoured of the idea, Violet, supposedly visionary plans to the contrary, is rooted in the past, one which comes with her sole imprimatur.
Thus is set in place a titanic battle of wills, one which is normally cosily resident in British films, which thrive on David and Goliath arcs where the villain is soundly and justifiably dispatched and the plucky underdog soars to victory on the progressive winds of rightness and change.
Sure, it can be a little inspirationally insubstantial at times, but it is, by and large, an effective recipe that can deliver, against all odds, a rousingly satisfying piece of drama.
Only that never really happens in The Bookshop.
With all the necessary pieces assembled with deliberate care and near-tedious undertaking – a likably earnest protagonist who loves books and the intoxicating buzz of new ideas and progress, a trenchant antagonist who is determined that her will prevail above all, and a cast of characters, both supportive and not – the film seems utterly unable to decide what to do with them.
Sporting some beautifully and comprehensively well-realised characters in Florence, her 14-year-old bookshop assistant Christine (Honor Kneafsey) and local book-loving eccentrically-principled recluse Edmund Brundish (Bill Nighy), and to a lesser extent Violet, and some achingly beautiful relationships between them, The Bookshop is nonetheless a series of appealingly conventional ingredients mixed together to near-tasteless effect.
At every turn, when momentum should be building and drama should be firing on all cylinders, the film remains resolutely inert and underwhelming with many major plot developments underbaked, leaving the narrative ticking off a series of storytelling markers such as Violet’s building opposition writ large and Florence’s back against the wall moment, arriving and departing with almost no emotional impact.
It’s as if the narrative pops up every now and again to announce that Something Big and Portentous Has Happened, only to disappear again, swallowed up by a very effectively-built but eventually hollow atmosphere of repression and fear.
This is 1959 after all, when the societal revolutions of the ’60s still lie over the horizon and the established order holds sway with fearsome dominion – Violet is reviled by everyone in secret but no one will oppose in public with spineless residents like BBC celebrity Miol North (James Lance) doing her bidding without argument – and so it stands to reason that you would make much of them.
Coixet does, with the endless grey forbidding skies and stultifying bleakness of Hardborough unleavened by anything approaching sunshiny optimism or giddy progressiveness.
In that respect, the film succeeds brilliantly, painting a tableau of a world in which the status quo is unquestioned and unchallenged, those in power wield it without fear or favour, and upstarts like Florence Green are collectively dealt with brutally and without remorse, but never openly, every underhanded, oppositional piece of maneuvering cloaked in the thinnest veneer of social acceptablity.
It’s iron fists in velvet gloves territory, and no one wields this more effectively than Violet, but while the mood is richly-wrought in all its agonisingly-awful glory, the narrative never rises up to meet it.
What we end with then is a film populated by mostly beautifully-realised characters and replete with some profound ideas and touching relationships such as that between Florence and Edmund which totally squanders, whatever dramatic potential it had hiding between its charged-storyline.
The idea of old coming hard up against new, of the status quo battling it out with progress is a fiercely invigorating one, the present day showing all too unsettlingly that it is a war for the ages and not just for villages caught in the inertia of 1950s England, but it is really explored, with the barest of nods made to what could have been a fascinatingly deep and incisive debate.
What we are left with after the narrative potential is thrown away is a film that is all style over substances, mood over tangibility, characters with nowhere really to go but the connect-a-dot rise in a story that is largely flat and featureless and bereft of the kinds of emotional touchpoints you might be expecting.
So bereft in fact that when the finale wreaks its worst, as if you know it will, you are left curiously unmoved, witness to a series of events that should be eliciting a cavalcade of feelings but which has about as much portent as putting the washing on the line.
Too little too late we are given a final scene that suggests all is not lost, and some good has come of this travesty – Violet’s diabolical agenda, not the movie itself (though it falls into the same camp) – but by then you have left the film, both physically and well before in your heart, every bit as uninterested and unengaged as much as of the town seems to be with the bookshop.
The Bookshop is a tale not so much of the future versus the mud-stuck present, though attempts are halfheartedly and hamfistedly made to turn this into A Thing, but of great characters and stunning atmosphere lost in the midst of an adaptation that seems every bit as desiccated and unable to revive as Violet’s withered soul, every bit as lost and lacking in fulfilment as Florence’s once-cherished dream turns out to be.