Rebecca

Remakes already exist in a long shadow, especially when the original is successful or revered. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca isn’t just successful — it won Best Picture, and it had Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. That’s coming up to the plate down 0-2 and swinging a broken bat. So it’s not surprising at all that the 2020 remake of Rebecca fails at everything. It’s never bad, but it never justifies its existence. Armie Hammer had the unfortunate task of stepping into Olivier’s shoes, and he fails utterly. Olivier’s Maxim de Winter is mercurial, his explosions of temper wound you as they do the new Mrs. de Winter but you can sense the love he has for his new wife. Hammer is aloof, dull, and often petulant. Fontaine and Lily James both portray the new wife with wonder, fear, and naïveté, but Fontaine has a steel in her. You can sense her trying to fit into her new world. James never feels that way; she just cries at everything and mopes a lot … until her last act turn into Nancy Drew, which makes no sense whatsoever. Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers and Kristen Scott Thomas’s are both icy and cruel, but Anderson’s holds back her motives, and Thomas’ is up front, neutering the impact of her connection and emotions. From a filmmaking standpoint, this remake is a mess. The score is never appropriate for the moment. The cinematography captures the beauty of the landscape, but fails to capture the claustrophobia the new Mrs. de Winter is feeling in the house. The de Winters are more visibly, physically intimate in this, but it feels like the movie is trying to sell you on the chemistry these two don’t have. The editing uses a lot of inter-cuts that add nothing, and dream sequences and hallucinations that feel taken from another movie. If you’ve never seen the original, and old movies aren’t your thing, you might be okay with this. It’s never bad. But if you’ve seen the original, seeing this is just watching a pale imitation. This doesn’t do anything the original didn’t, except lack a pulse or a reason for existing.