The Object of Beauty

Jake Bartholomew (John Malkovich) and Tina (Andie MacDowell) are of no fixed abode but spend their days travelling from one luxury hotel to the next. At the moment they are in London. But cracks are beginning to show: Jake’s wealth is tied up in a large cocoa shipment grounded by a dock strike in Sierra Leone. His credit cards are beginning to bounce and the hotel is making discreet noises about the amount of debt he’s piling up. However, Tina owns a small Henry Moore bronze sculpted head, one of only nine in existence, given to her as a present by her first husband. It’s worth about £25,000. Jake devises a plan to have the head “stolen” and claim on the insurance. However, the head really is stolen…by deaf-mute chambermaid Jenny (Rudi Davies) who alone can see the beauty of the sculpture...

The Object of Beauty is the kind of would-be sophisticated light comedy that might just have worked during the Depression, when displays of luxury and affluence acted as escapism for the audience. Nowadays, many people would have an inbuilt resistance to a film about the problems of the rich and spoiled. That’s not to say you can’t make an engaging film about the privileged classes – Whit Stillman’s films, his first one Metropolitan especially, show that you can – but The Object of Beauty, while certainly watchable, isn’t one of them. It’s hard to care about anyone here. Jenny supposedly alone appreciates the beauty of the sculpture (and that’s arguable) and falls in love with it…but theft is still theft.

As so often, much of the fault lies with a script (by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg) that seems to be in need of at least one more go-through. Another draft might have tightened up a rambling mid-section. Lolita Davidovich, playing Jake and Tina’s best friend Joan, is stuck with an ill-established and underwritten role. She’s having an affair with Jake, a plot element which seems to have come out of nowhere and goes nowhere too. It may well be that this is what remains of a subplot that’s otherwise on the cutting room floor, but as this is a MGM back-catalogue DVD, you can’t expect any deleted scenes to indicate that. Malkovich and MacDowell give entirely professional lead performances and there are solid contributions from a strong supporting cast. Peter Riegert is wasted in a brief role as Tina’s soon-to-be-ex-husband. Rudi Davies (the daughter of writer Beryl Bainbridge) began her career in Grange Hill and had made an impact the year before this film was made as Sally, a teenage girl seduced by family friend Trevor Eve, in the BBC serial A Sense of Guilt. It’s nice to see a film featuring a disabled person when the story is not about the experience of being disabled (the film would be virtually unchanged if Jenny could speak and hear), and this film was made four years before Four Weddings and a Funeral did much the same thing. Davies manages to convey quite a lot with no dialogue, giving the role a slightly spacey and otherworldly quality that goes some way to explaining why she feels a connection with the statuette. According to the IMDB, she’s had no film or TV role in the last ten years.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg is best known as a director (though this is his only writing credit) for the Beatles film Let it Be and for Brideshead Revisited (co-directed with Charles Sturridge). Much of his work has been on television. He does a capable job here, and David Watkin’s camerawork makes the film very easy on the eye. Tom Bähler’s score is light jazz, dominated by a double bass.



The DVD
The Object of Beauty is another MGM back-catalogue disc, and you know what to expect by now: menus using symbols rather than words, despite a choice of five languages (English, German, French, Italian and Spanish), sixteen chapter stops, no extras. The disc is encoded, as usual, for Regions 2 and 4. Oddly, considering the film’s length, the DVD is dual-layered, unlike many other MGM discs of a similar running time. Perhaps the addition of an extra soundtrack pushed this one over the limit.

The film is transferred anamorphically in the correct ratio of 1.85:1. Watkin’s camerawork is deliberately soft (using gauze, I wouldn’t be surprised) to give the film it’s high-style romantic look, and that carries over into the DVD transfer, and there is some grain. However, the colours are true, blacks solid and shadow detail generally fine.

The Object of Beauty is a product of the pre-digital cinema sound era, so the original Dolby Stereo soundtrack becomes a surround-encoded Dolby Digital 2.0 track on this DVD. It isn’t the most adventurous of mixes, using the surrounds mainly for the music score and for ambient sounds. The dialogue is generally clear, but a couple of exchanges were mixed so low that I would have missed what was being said if I hadn’t had the subtitles on. I briefly sampled the other soundtracks, dubbed versions in German, French, Italian and Spanish. The German and Italian are surround-encoded, the others mono. The Polish track plays a male voiceover on top of the English track, which you can still hear, very low.

There are no extras at all. Par for the course, I’m afraid. I haven’t seen a review of the Region 1 release from Artisan, but it doesn’t appear to be much better specified.

The Object of Beauty is a trifling film, watchable enough for the hour and a half it’s on screen, but just as easily forgettable. It gets a bare-bones release from MGM. If you really want to see this, rent it or buy it in a sale.