"The White Countess"You’ve gotta love the perks of drama school. My institution, The American Academy of Dramatic Arts, has a sort of working partnership with the Screen Actor’s Guild, who uses our facilities to host Q&A sessions with certain working screen actors, and SAG invites the students to those conversations. Another perk of this partnership is that the students are often invited to movie screenings that the SAG Foundation is sponsoring. In a recent serties, I found an opportunity to see a preview of “The White Countess,” with a Q&A session with Natasha Richardson afterward.

It’s been almost a week since I’ve seen the film, and I’m still a bit torn by it. The plot is as follows:

Ralph Fiennes plays Todd Jackson, a blind, debauched, former diplomat who now spends his time in the various seedy bars of Shanghai. His ambition is to create the perfect dive, a combination of the fashionable, the political, the tragic and the decadent. He meets his establishment’s muse in Sofia (Natasha Richardson), a former White Russian countess who fled the Bolshevik revolution and now works as a taxi-driver and sometime prostitute to make ends meet for her family. On the eve of World War II, it is Sofia who rekindles the spark of pride and dignity in Jackson just as the Japanese invade the province.
- from IMDB

The story itself was intriguing. I felt as if the plotline could have made for a decent flick. Unfortunately, I think that the film tried a bit too hard to be an Oscar film, and not a good movie.

First of all, the script seemed to have so much emotional impact in its story that Fiennes’ character did not have to be blind. In fact, I think that his blindness not only created an acting challenge for everyone involved in the cast, but served to disconnect some members of the audience. While some moviegoers will be moved even further by the fact that he’s blind, it’s easy to forget that we connect with our film stars through their eyes. When their eyes are completely blank, our feelings toward them will probably mimic that.

The movie, on the whole, is a bit too English for me. Not that I don’t enjoy English actors (in fact, I find them to be some of the best), but there’s something about UK-based films (excluding Harry Potter) that kind of turn me off. One of the major differences between US and UK acting styles is the use of human emotion. I feel like English films are more dialogue based, while American films are more emotional. This film, which would have worked well as an emotional movie, played instead as text heavy.

Ralph Fiennes is a bit too method here. The camera is a bit to your left, Ralph.

Let’s put it this way — at one point during the film, I leaned over to my friend Christian and said, “Dude, shit needs to start blowing up right now… or I’m gonna freak.” An hour later, things did start blowing up… and it didn’t make a difference.

That’s not even mentioning the guy next to Christian who fell asleep twenty minutes in, and didn’t wake up until Natasha Richardson’s Q & A session afterward.

White Countess will definitely get some Oscar buzz, so if that’s your thing… by all means, go for it. Otherwise, this movie is best served as a “I-want-to-rent-a-movie-but-I’ve-seen-everything-else-in-this-video-store” kind of film.

Regardless of how entertaining it is, it’ll probably get Ralph Fiennes an Academy Award.
**EDIT (6-3-06) :: Wow, how wrong was that? Strange too, as blind is usually a shoe-in for at least an Oscar nomination. Allright… maybe I was off on the Oscar, but maybe he’ll get the Tony for “Faith Healer.”