As it stands, Mulligan will have to settle for the best actress nod she is sure to get for the imminent Promising Young Woman. With a little more weight behind the campaign, Fiennes and Mulligan could have been on the Oscar trail. None of which can sabotage the good work done by the two leads. They are just stranded by a story that springs too jarringly from nowhere when our affections are already elsewhere invested. This feels like a subplot from the novel – apparently told from various viewpoints – that should have been hastily plugged when it became apparent the chief stream was, with no assistance from tributaries, gushing so vigorously.Ĭhaplin and James aren’t bad. It soon becomes clear, however, that we are actually supposed to care about his apparent impotence (or maybe homosexuality) and her romantic frustration (later wandering eye). At first it seems that drab Lily James, wearing her specs like the beautiful secretary who will pull a transformation in the last reel, and Ben Chaplin, again a generation older than his romantic partner, are just there as background decoration. It would be overstating the case to say the film falls apart in its last half hour, but focus too often strays to the dull romantic complications between a young couple drafted in to work on the later excavations. Sometimes it takes a foreigner to capture a nation’s soul. Mike Eley’s spinning camera captures an idealised, dust-flaked England – Hurricanes and Spitfires manoeuvring above – as it worries through a famously glorious summer. Much of the script is delivered as internal monologue.

Stone, an Australian directing his second feature, seems to have taken lessons from Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven.

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