My being familiar with the original 1971 Clint Eastwood version of this movie, I see that Sophia Coppola stripped away all the rich character development and backstory of Ms Farnsworth's incestuous relationship with her brother as well as the flashbacks that revealed the true conniving nature of John McBurney and the sexual fantasy aspect of these characters which was the basis for their motivation in the story. Miss Coppola seemed to sacrifice all this for the sake of making a film that appear to focus on nothing more than a fancy woman's dress party, as if they were all attending a gala ball every day, as well as some obsession of including trees with Spanish moss in almost every scene filmed at almost every angle with the camera being held on them for an usually prolonged period. The result of which made this film nothing more than a boring shallow one dimensional film and was seemingly made by her for the sake of creating nothing more than a moving piece of art to show female regal apparel and Spanish moss trees.
Review of The Beguiled
