My Brilliant Career (1979, Gill Armstrong) (Patreon)

58/100

"[S]hows considerable charm and craft, though it's essentially taxidermy," begins Pauline Kael's review, and those last two words pretty much encapsulate my feeling about most literary adaptations. This one exhibits signs of life primarily via the young, then-unknown Judy Davis (as well as the youngish, then-barely-known Sam Neill); it's gratifying, though not unexpected, to see that she's always been a spiky presence, happy to run roughshod over gender stereotypes. (I first fell for her as George Sand in Impromptu.) Unfortunately, Sybylla's rejection of society's dictates remains largely theoretical until the film's final minutes, having no expression in the absence of the novel's first-person interior monologue. I know my habit of quoting passages from books to demonstrate what's been lost in translation must be getting tiresome, but it's really the best and arguably the only sensible way to make sense of the taxidermy problem. Quoth she:

The next unpleasant discovery I made in regard to myself was that I was woefully out of my sphere. I studied the girls of my age around me, and compared myself with them. We had been reared side by side. They had had equal advantages; some, indeed, had had greater. We all moved in the one little, dull world, but they were not only in their world, they were of it; I was not. Their daily tasks and their little pleasures provided sufficient oil for the lamp of their existence—mine demanded more than Possum Gully could supply. They were totally ignorant of the outside world. Patti, Melba, Irving, Terry, Kipling, Caine, Corelli, and even the name of Gladstone, were only names to them. Whether they were islands or racehorses they knew not and cared not. With me it was different. Where I obtained my information, unless it was born in me, I do not know. We took none but the local paper regularly, I saw few books, had the pleasure of conversing with an educated person from the higher walks of life about once in a twelvemonth, yet I knew of every celebrity in literature, art, music, and drama; their world was my world, and in fancy I lived with them. My parents discouraged me in that species of foolishness. They had been fond of literature and the higher arts, but now, having no use for them, had lost interest therein.

I'm at a loss to understand how someone could read that and think "This would make a terrific movie." It would not, and it does not. The character so vividly etched in just that single paragraph does not exist onscreen, despite Davis' best efforts. Sybylla's jones for culture gets mentioned in passing but is otherwise nowhere evident; her sense of intellectual superiority gets downplayed in favor of her self-consciousness about being ugly (which comes straight from the book but makes little sense when we're looking at Davis; the worst you can say is that her hair is unruly). Nor is Gillian Armstrong—or "Gill," as she's billed here—the kind of filmmaker who can convey such information visually rather than verbally. She does a workmanlike job of presenting what Sybylla says and does, which is of little importance compared to what Sybylla thinks (i.e., 95% of the source material). Consequently, the movie plays less like an ornery character study than it does like a fairly conventional across-the-tracks romance that perversely rejects its designated happy ending. The final scene still packs a surprising wallop (and must have been truly bracing 40 years ago), but that's partly because it arrives virtually out of nowhere.