The Sunday Times (London)

March 10, 1996, Sunday

Bring back Oliver Cromwell

Stephen Amidon

Luxuriant hair and fine costumes are no substitute for a coherent story and believable characters. STEPHEN AMIDON says even cavaliers won’t approve of this Restoration.
Restoration (15) is set in an epoch dear to all self-respecting wardrobe artists those years of opulent foppery immediately following the collapse of Oliver Cromwell’s austere regime in 1660. Never in British history have curly wigs, brocaded jackets and silk hankies had a finer hour than during his post-puritanical spasm of excess and experimentation. It is hardly surprising, then, that the film’s 30-strong wardrobe department (including three hat designers, a textile artist and a glove-maker) have acquitted themselves so admirably. The denizens of this film make the characters in The Madness of King George look like a clutch of Millwall supporters.
Unfortunately, in draping Restoration in such luxuriant threads, the movie’s makers seem to have skimped on a few other elements, most notably story and characterisation. The result is a film that is all dressed up with no place to go. Based on Rose Tremain’s celebrated 1989 novel, the film opens in 1663 as a dashing young medical student, Robert Merivel (Robert Downey Jr), pursues his studies at the Royal College of Medicine. Restless and bored by his inability to do good, Merivel fortuitously comes to the attention of the recently enthroned Charles II (Sam Neill). He is invited to court, where he is given the daunting task of saving the life of the king’s beloved spaniel. The hard-partying young doctor decides to let sleeping dogs lie while he chases the palace’s gilded skirts, a course of action that proves serendipitous the dog pulls through on its own. Merivel not only gets his gong, but is also asked to make an honest woman of Charles’s beloved mistress, Celia (Polly Walker), so that the king can have gossip-free access to her. Merivel weds her and, in return for becoming the king’s beard, is rewarded with a sumptuous Suffolk estate complete with an income that will keep his cellar flooded with claret and his bed warm with courtesans.
But his luck runs out when he does the one thing forbidden him he falls in love with Celia. Spurned by her and then betrayed by the unctuous portrait artist Finn (Hugh Grant), Merivel is banished to work in a Quaker-run insane asylum. There he not only rediscovers his lost passion for medicine, but also falls in love with a suitably fetching Irish crazy, Katharine (Meg Ryan). After curing her, the two return to London, where their love and Merivel’s commitment to Enlightenment values are tested by the rigours of childbirth, plague and conflagration.
It is a pity that Michael Hoffman (best known as the director of the frothy satire, Soapdish) proves so incapable of bringing out the drama inherent in Merivel’s revolutionary life and times. He seems overwhelmed by both the subject matter and the visual spectacle he has created. The film never establishes a coherent tone, veering wildly between low comedy and reverential solemnity. The first 30 minutes are broadly leavened with farce as Merivel publicly indulges a gift for musical farting and races about the palace dressed only in a strategically placed feather, though Hoffman is clearly uneasy with these attempts at crude laughs, balancing them with weighty pronouncements about Merivel being ”a creature of the new age”. And the rigours of all that sumptuous design gradually take their toll Merivel is more than a little lost as he wanders from set piece to glorious set piece. At times, it feels as if Hoffman had started with his locations and then populated them with characters and story. The few scenes that do work, such as when Merivel grasps a patient’s beating heart, fail to have any real payoff. After a while, his compulsive skirt-lifting seems more an effort to find the elusive storyline than simple randiness. With his banishment from court, the film finally achieves a consistent tone. Unfortunately, it becomes consistently melodramatic. What threatened to be a romp becomes something slow and sober and staid. Merivel’s tenure at the asylum sees the heel become the healer. And yet, for all his earnestness, his breakthroughs in psychiatry prove something less than revolutionary he cures the afflicted by teaching them to dance. The entire sequence is little more than an excuse for his affair with Katharine, which just may be the first reported sighting of saccharine on the British Isles. With Merivel’s return to plague-gripped, fire-ravaged London, the film slips into bathetic overdrive as the saintly doctor cures bulbous patients with one hand while holding his motherless daughter in the other.
Hoffman’s inability to find a consistent directorial tone is matched by a similar unease in screenwriter Rupert Walters, whose characters spend more time explaining the story to one another than participating in it. Often, their dialogue sounds as if they are mistakenly reading out the stage directions, such as when one Quaker doctor turns to another to pronounce that ”when the time is right, Robert will leave us. And he will take Katharine with him. Because she is carrying his child”. Sure enough, in the next frame we see Merivel and his betrothed rumbling off in a cart. Later, Charles announces ”the plague has arrived” just as a sequence of Dureresque tableaux of sick citizens appears. In this film, even bacteria get a trailer.
It is hardly surprising, given the film’s overall unevenness, that the performances suffer. The usually fine Downey is particularly at a loss, unsure whether to play Merivel as a wigged buffoon or an Anglo Candide. His transition from callow sensualist to Enlightenment hero happens so abruptly, he seems to be playing two different characters. Indeed, the very casting of Downey is symptomatic of the film’s confusion, standing in the no man’s land between the box office bankability of a Cruise and the artistic cachet of a Day Lewis. Neill’s king, meanwhile, positively bristles with missed opportunities, as does David Thewlis as a pious doctor, although he does manage to infuse his hoary Quakerisms with a certain amount of feeling. Both Grant and Ian McKellen (as Merivel’s trusted, slightly dim servant) are underused, though nobody fares worse than Ryan, a sweetly sexy comic actress who is completely wrong as a central-casting madwoman. In a particularly embarrassing scene, she is forced to perform a lunatic dance that bears an uncanny resemblance to the pre-fight ceremonial strut of the sumo champion, Konishiki.
In the end, Restoration resembles not so much its fine source novel as those extravagantly staged, immediately forgotten entertainments bored courtiers once enacted for each another. Nothing is more indicative of the confused heart of this film than its denouement, in which Merivel, who seems to have lost everything, flees a burning London for his Suffolk estate. Just before despair can consume him, salvation arrives in the form of King Charles, who brings not only Merivel’s rescued daughter, but also the news that, in recompense for his services, the young doctor gets to keep the mansion. It is altogether fitting, in a film that places style over substance, that this should be the reward for self-sacrifice and epic suffering a stately manor that looks just swell on screen.