The line separating passionate desire from roiling hatred is so thin that it becomes nonexistent in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, the intoxicating new remake of a Civil War-set oddity from 1971, which starred Clint Eastwood and was directed by Dirty Harry‘s Don Siegel. Colin Farrell takes over Eastwood’s role as Corporal John McBurney, an injured Union soldier who is rescued and protected by the inhabitants of a Southern girls school. Farrell is nothing like Eastwood, and the film doesn’t require him to be. While many of the main events from the earlier film (and presumably the source novel by Thomas Cullinan) reappear here, along with certain snatches of dialogue (not always spoken by the same character in both films), Coppola has created something entirely different. Where the original film was naturalistic with flashes of madness, the 2017 Beguiled is a subtle slow-burn thriller, heavy on portent and Gothic atmosphere.
Nicole Kidman is Martha Farnsworth, the headmistress of the school. She seems to be constantly projecting what she thinks a respectable Southern lady should be. She’s genteel, but backed with a stern sense of propriety. She tries to hide and protect the girls from what she assumes is the leering eyes and minds of passing soldiers, but when she has one unconscious in her music room, she must resist the temptation to molest him herself. It’s a testament to Kidman’s talent that she constantly suggests the neurotic gymnastics occurring within Miss Farnsworth while maintaining her stoic facade.
Kirsten Dunst is the old-maid schoolteacher, Edwina, who quietly yearns for something else. When Farrell’s injured soldier wakes up and starts aggressively flirting with Edwina, viewers are left to wonder if he is genuinely taken with her (despite the plain way she is made-up and photographed, she is still Kirsten Dunst after all) or if this Irish-accented charmer has such a good read on people that he immediately susses out her weakness and tries to pounce on it.
The five students at the school all get swept up in the mystery of the handsome stranger. The oldest girl, teenaged Alicia (Elle Fanning), tries out her feminine wiles on McBurney, with resounding success. (In an unsurprising change from the original film, Alicia is the only student that McBurney kisses this time around.) Young dreamer Amy (Oona Laurence) comes to believe she has a special friendship with the soldier because she’s the one who discovered him. Even Jane (The Nice Guys‘ Angourie Rice), who is opposed to helping the Yankee cause in any way, slowly warms to McBurney after he compliments her ability to play music.
Coppola does a brilliant job of building and expanding the tension, making certain that no one shows their cards too soon. After all, it would be hard for any man in a house full of seven adoring females not to feel genuinely flattered. But we can’t help but wonder about McBurney anyway. Is he just manipulating his friendly captors, biding his time until he is well enough to escape? When he reveals that he is a recent immigrant who joined the Union army for cash, is that a positive or a negative? Or is he just saying what he hopes the women will want to hear?
The film has already caught major flack from a lot of pop culture outlets for eliminating a black slave character that was in the original film, making this vision of the American Civil War lily-white. People are going to think what they want, and even I don’t really find Coppola’s official answer about the exclusion satisfying, but I completely understand why this film benefits aesthetically from losing that character. Mae Mercer was utterly brilliant as the cynical Hallie in the earlier film, but her main story function was to help poke holes in McBurney’s respectable front. In the case of this film, a character doing that would undermine the ambiguity that makes this take on the material so special. Sure, Coppola could have found another function for the character, but if she didn’t want to, she didn’t want to.
After all, Hallie is far from the only speaking part Coppola completely ignored from the prior film. She essentially removes the security blanket of the outside world, stranding her characters in their predicament. In fact, the world of Coppola’s version becomes so isolated that it eventually turns into a No Exit-style purgatory. When events take an inevitable dark turn, a sense of claustrophobia colors the proceedings. It’s a big improvement over the ’71 film’s conception of the ending. The characters find themselves inexplicably bound together, unable to seek the help of anyone outside the house, and that sense of suffocation more logically motivates the madness of their final actions.
As a mood piece, as a character study, as an acting showcase, as an exercise in slow-burn suspense… The Beguiled delivers. It’s already one of the best films of this year.
The Beguiled opens in New York and Los Angeles today. It goes wider next week.
Justin Remer makes movies, directs music videos, and plays in the bands Duck the Piano Wire and Elastic No-No Band when he is not writing movie reviews. His folk-rock documentary MAKING LOVERS & DOLLARS is currently streaming on Amazon.