In between tense moments, 'Gray' is another tired melodrama

Friday, January 11, 2002

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

The radiant Cate Blanchett goes behind enemy lines and gets caught in the crossfire of confused allegiance and ruthless political sacrifice in Gillian Armstrong's stolid take on this World War II resistance thriller, based on the novel by Sebastian Falks.

MOVIE REVIEW

CHARLOTTE GRAY

DIRECTOR: Gillian Armstrong

CAST: Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Michael Gambon, Rupert Penry-Jones

RUNNING TIME: 121 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for some war-related violence, sensuality and brief strong language

WHERE: Harvard Exit

GRADE: C

Scottish nurse turned British secret agent Charlotte Gray travels to Vichy, France, to play courier to the French Resistance, motivated almost solely by personal concerns: her lover, an RAF flier played by Rupert Penry-Jones, has crashed in the south of France and she means to find him.

Instead she finds dreamboat French communist Julien Levade (Billy Crudup), a passionate Resistance fighter who shelters her after her contact is dragged off by the Nazis.

That scene, the best the film has to offer, should have become the defining moment of the picture: Jittery rookie Charlotte breaks protocol and her French counterpart, sensing Charlotte's imminent doom as a Nazi officer asks for her papers, pockets the incriminating evidence and takes the fall.

The romance of espionage is replaced with the reality of war: Nazi soldiers patrolling the woods and sweeping the town for Jews, French informers peeping around every corner, the ruthless politics of the Allies sacrificing their own.

You'd expect a tense espionage thriller from all this -- Charlotte even participates in guerrilla sabotage raids -- but the film slumbers as Charlotte goes incognito as housekeeper to Julien's embittered, estranged WWI veteran father (Michael Gambon) and mothering keeper of two hidden Jewish orphans.

Blanchett's pale blue eyes, alabaster skin and odd, angular beauty radiate a hard but human resolve in films like "Elizabeth" and "Lord of the Rings." Here she's more like a deer caught in the military spotlight as her ideals are shot down before her wide eyes.


		JAAP BUITENDIJK
	Cate Blanchett in "Charlotte Gray"

"Charlotte Gray" manages to hold itself in a stasis between the heroic sacrifices of soldiers and deglamorized revelations of realpolitik treachery, as if director Armstrong can't really decide what exactly the film is all about. The politics are confused and the atmosphere is a muddy mess, a haphazard mix of continental accents and inconsistent languages that's supposed to represent salt-of-the-earth rural France.

It's ultimately just numb, a sober wartime romance roused only by Blanchett's intensity and Crudup's passionate swings between righteous anger and moral zeal. The rest is just tired melodrama.