Movie Review: 'A Little Chaos'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- "There is an outdoor ballroom in the gardens of Versailles. In what follows, that much at least is true."
So begins A Little Chaos, a fictionalized seventeenth-century drama that tells us immediately that it's neither literal history nor documentary truth.
Kate Winslet stars as working widow Sabine de Barra, a commoner garden designer with radical notions of gardening (that include an outdoor ballroom and fountains) and the only woman candidate making a bid to be assistant landscape architect of the still-under-construction Palace of Versailles, the king's new permanent residence just outside Paris, in 1682.
Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts plays the king's enigmatic chief landscaper, Andre LeNotre, the famous formalist architect and landscape garden designer who has advertised for an assistant.
He certainly appreciates and acknowledges Madame de Barra's independence and assertiveness, especially considering the gender and class barriers at the time.
But he also feels that her style may be far too undisciplined -- and, well, chaotic -- for this project, which he believes should be perfectly and symmetrically manicured in the conservative, classical style appropriate for the palace.
Yet he hires her, the least likely candidate to have won the coveted position.
Although these two obviously clash a bit philosophically, there appears to be something of a romantic spark between them.
Alan Rickman plays King Louis XIV, whose court in his new digs bursts at the seams with intrigue and gossip and competition and jealousy and deception, and he longs for a quiet moment alone or an honest exchange with someone -- anyone -- who is not trying to impress him.
And Stanley Tucci, providing the film's comic relief, plays the Sun King's flamboyant brother.
Familiar character actor Rickman is also the director, and in only his second film behind the camera (following 1997's The Winter Guest) he gets strong performances all around, elevating a script that he co-wrote with Jeremy Brock and Alison Deegan that could use some help moving things along instead of standing around and admiring its surroundings.
Winslet, who has established herself as one of our most dependable and accomplished screen actresses with six Oscar nominations and a best actress Oscar (for 2008's The Reader), is so effortlessly commanding and authentic from her first moment on, letting us see that this woman of conviction trails a tragic past long before she tells us why, that she gives us what turns out to be a bit of false hope about just how involving her journey is about to be.
The screenplay is occasionally anachronistic not only in its dialogue but in pitching for resonance by forcing a modern sensibility onto that long-gone era.
Still, Winslet holds the screen so surehandedly, and her honest and direct protagonist is so admirable and sympathetic, that we are more than happy to wait for the details of her backstory, which turn out to be a bit more generic than we anticipated.
So we'll plant 2½ stars out of 4 for this somewhat stodgy but handsome and green-thumbed costume drama with a lead performance that's anything but garden-variety.
A lot of Winslet goes a long way in A Little Chaos.
