Sometimes I’m not sure what’s worse – a film that is just bad through and through and can be dismissed as a total misfire on all cylinders, or one that has a lot of potential and good ideas that are completely squandered in the final product. Tamara Drewe is of the latter variety, and I’m not sure whether to mark it up a little because I could see so many things that could’ve made it really good, or down a little because it fails to take advantage of any of them.
Though the film is named after Tamara Drewe, the film is really an ensemble effort centered on the denizens of a small English village – a middle-aged couple who rent out rooms in their home to writers seeking quiet and solitude, the young man who works for them as a gardener and handyman (but whose family ages ago used to own the adjoining estate), the pair of teenage girls who wreak havoc around town out of boredom, and eventually Tamara, who left town years earlier but now returns in triumph of some sort after self-changing plastic surgery. The opening sequence leaps from writer to writer at the boarding house, a quite effective set-up that quickly and deftly characterizes each writer’s style and outlook. This is one strand that could’ve been really interesting in the film and was dropped – I really wanted the writers to become a Greek chorus of sorts, popping in to comment on the action of the main story from their very different points of view. Alas, just about all of them except the one needed for a later plot point disappear entirely after the first scene.
Another is the issue of self-identity as encapsulated by Tamara. A relatively homely girl when she was last in the village (though really, Gemma Arterton is not very believable as homely) with an overdeveloped nose, she briefly dated the now-gardener before leaving to become a journalist in the big city and get her nose fixed. There’s a tension, though, between Tamara’s confidence in her new look and her understanding that it’s both easier to get attention now and harder to be taken seriously. But though her changed appearance is referred to constantly throughout the film, any real exploration of her identity and how it is affected by her physical change is completely eschewed in favor of an uninteresting love triangle and the antics of the teenagers.
About those teenagers. Seldom have I encountered more annoying characters than these two – well, especially the one, whose entire purpose in life is to make stupid trouble for other people (egging cars and the like) and try to meet her favorite rock star Ben Sergeant (Dominic Cooper playing somewhere between Lost‘s Dominic Mongahan and Forgetting Sarah Marshall‘s Russell Brand), who just happens to break up with his band while doing a show out here in the middle of nowhere and ends up hooking up with Tamara. From here on a majority of the film follows this miscreant trying to break up Tamara and Ben without this making Ben leave town. And in one way, it’s a good thing she’s making mischief everywhere, because the film would’ve been deadly boring without her. On the other hand, the rest of the film could’ve been written SO MUCH BETTER and not have needed her to liven it up.
And that’s really the issue here – it’s as if they realized they hadn’t written Tamara as a well-rounded and troubled character and then freaked out that they didn’t have enough of a story and decided to throw in all this other stuff (there’s also a whole other subplot with the middle-aged couple, which is actually decent but its subdued tone gets lost among everything else) instead of fixing the real problems. Because there are hints here and there that there’s a lot more to Tamara than what we see – in one scene near the end she has a heated conversation with an older man that suggests a depth to her self-image problems that could’ve been great if it hadn’t been the only scene like that. (Gemma Arterton does a great job with those few minutes, incidentally, showing me enough to make me hope she gets some meatier parts on down the road.) The film is based on a graphic novel that I haven’t read, so I’m not sure whether the blame for this squandered potential lies with the filmmakers (Stephen Frears is usually a solid filmmaker) or with the source, but it literally feels like no one bothered to read or watch this whole thing all together before sending it out the door.
I didn’t completely hate watching the film, though – it has a certain amount of superficial charm, and it’s certainly prettily shot and cast. Tamsin Greig is impressive as the older woman who pretty much becomes the center of any emotional connection to the film since Tamara is written so poorly. The rural English setting is ripe for the type of quirky English comedy that isn’t really English so much as it is what Americans want to think English country folk are like, and the film does overplay the stereotype a bit much, but mostly innocuously. But you can feel the film unraveling as you watch it, and that’s a bit of a frustrating experience.