VividSimon Simply Perfect

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Bumpy Chip It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

mark.waltz And so it begins, the calculations in the mind of a "Wicked Lady". This is the type of delicious melodrama (often with comic overtones) that Gainsborough was known for in the mid 1940's, usually starring the gorgeous Margaret Lockwood. But Jessica Lange's Cousin Bette is not a ravishing beauty; in fact, she's quite unlovely. Lack of makeup (or pale powder) turns the usually gorgeous Lange into quite the plain spinster, devoted to the dying day of her older cousin, Geraldine Chaplin. She seemed to believe that her devotion would make her wealthy widowed cousin in law Hugh Laurie wish to marry her so she could take over the running of the household. Well, housekeepers do run the house through their master's orders, so in a sense, she got her wish. As surrogate mother to Laurie's children, she becomes a confidante as most servants do, and it's instantly fascinating to watch the wheels turn in Lange's severely coiffed head. What could have been a complex melodrama of a woman's vengeance turns out to be a convoluted reversal of fortune version of "Dangerous Liaisons" where a poor relative of the Mobility plays sexual mind games with the young, vowing vengeance on the second cousin who marries the much younger man she tried to control after saving his life. Much of the cast seem far too American in style and mood to be believable as Napoleon era French. Elisabeth Shue, in particularly miscast both in the age of her character and her believability in the setting. The musical sequences, too, obviously influenced by the success of "Amadeus", are seemingly modern musical theater style rather than the proper baroque feeling. Of course costumes and sets are lush, but that doesn't take away from the falseness of the film overall.

OutsideHollywoodLand Most costume dramas about a poor relation follow a similar trail: The poor one, filled with high expectations and good intentions, gets the money and true love by suffering through a series of pitfalls, only to be winking at the audience by the ending credits. Our Cousin Bette gets there, but she chooses another road, perhaps more hazardous, but infinitely more entertaining for us. This fascinating tale is about a relative who is treated poorly by everyone in her aristocratic family, while they themselves live in debt, denial, and high fashion. Jessica Lange plays the title character with a cynical smirk, as though she's daring every one to call her out, yet she knows – only too well - that people are so consumed by their own personal dramas that they ignore the fine details.Described as "the bad seed who refused to blossom", Bette is the sister of Adeline, who languidly takes her time dying, while instructing her spinster sibling as to what flowers to lay on her casket. One look at the two – Adeline in her death-bed finery and Bette, in a basic drab dress, devoid of any adornment – and it's all too evident where the balance of power resides. Bette: (to Jenny) "How could you know? You don't know who I was sacrificed to – to Adeline. They slapped me and caressed her. I went dressed like a wretch and she like a fine lady. Adeline, the garden, peel the vegetables, Bette. She never lifted a finger except to tie her ribbons."Describing herself as a "country peasant", Bette lives in the slums of Paris, working as a costume seamstress to the reigning burlesque star of the day, Jenny Cadine (played by Elizabeth Shue), who vainly shows off her derrière before every final curtain is rung down. Jenny puts off the ticking clock of time by enjoying the attentions of her many rich – and generous - admirers, yet one fateful day encounters her worst nightmare.Jenny: "I'm 24…I may as well be dead."Bette: "You were 24 years old yesterday and it didn't seem to bother you then." Jenny: "Today, while I was walking in the park, I came across a hideous old woman, face swollen and scratched; she stank of stale wine and sweat. In her filthy tresses she had placed a beauty patch, one red camellia I knew at once who she was - she was known as Carabine, the most famous courtesan in Paris. Everyone envied her dazzling shoulders, her milky skin. She had a neck so smooth it might have been turned on a lathe. Her trademark was a red beauty patch, a red camellia."'Carabine? Is that you?', I asked. 'No, there is no Carabine, she has left me.' Originally a novel by French author, Honore de Balzac, this modern version boasts an international cast of talent. Bob Hoskins (Cesar Crevel), Hugh Laurie (Baron Hector Hulot), Aden Young (Wenceslas), Kelly Macdonald (Hortense Hulot), and Geraldine Chaplin (Adeline Hulot) all twist and turn in time to Bette's song of vengeance. Set in Paris, during the pre-revolutionary period of 1846, screenwriters Seifert and Tarr turn Balzac's morality tale into a microcosm of the class resentments barely simmering just beneath the pearls and petticoats of Bette's shadow world. Yet she's nothing if not flexible, as she revises her best-laid plans in the face of cross and double-cross by family and high society associates alike. Bette: "I'll see them – all of them – in the dust! We're both daughters of the soil, and blood of the voge, and do you trust me, as a sister?"Jenny: "Yes…"Bette: "And will you help me, as you would a sister?"Jenny: "Yes…"Bette: "Then you will be the ax and I'll be the hand that wields it."Surrounded by people with their own notions of power, Bette plays nonstop Powernoply until she wins all, while the French Revolution rages. She's able to play upon the passions of her tormentors and deftly manages to wreck her subtle brand of ruthless revenge upon one and all, causing adultery, a duel, physical illness, embezzlement, financial ruin, imprisonment in the Bastille, and a crime of passion - all of which sees her contentedly sewing in the grand house, dressed in her own silken finery, cooing to a child who's the product of this genteel carnage.

judec-sd The closing credits on this movie rolled more than an hour ago. I still feel soiled.The only good thing about director Des McAnuff's version of Cousin Bette is Jessica Lange's excellent turn as Bette, that misunderstood, underestimated old maid hiding her lifelong rage and jealousy beneath a mask of family loyalty.In all other respects, this adaptation is execrable. Screenwriters Lynn Siefert and Susan Tarr should be banned from ever penning any more literary adaptations.Balzac's Cousin Bette was a masterpiece, an eternal condemnation of the selfishness of vice, achieved through a portrayal of depravity's destruction of virtue. The cinematic version is a mediocre daytime drama in petticoats.The power of the original novel derives from Balzac's use of fascinatingly, unforgettably, tragically human characters to illuminate his pitiless moral: that virtue, nine times out of ten, will fall to the knife in the back of vice. That moral is played out through the characters. And from the pure, pious, and eternally forgiving Adeline Hulot, a wife willing to forgive and forget more than two decades of her adored husband's infidelity, all the way down to the Jewish courtesan Josepha, at once a shameless gold-digger, a great artist, and, at heart, a kind woman, every player in Balzac's grand tragedy plays an irreplaceable part and illuminates an unalterable truth. And it is with the writers' treatment of those characters that McAnuff's Cousin Bette first fails.The greatest tragedy of the novel lies in the gradual abandonment and destruction of the saintly Adeline Hulot. After closing her eyes to two decades of infidelity, she slowly falls from her position into terrible poverty and neglect--one of those illuminations of the destruction of virtue by vice which gives the novel its power. Siefert and Tarr seem not to have grasped this essential point of the source material. Instead of having to deal with the difficulty of a great beauty thrown into the gutter, they have taken the easy way out by killing her off within the first five minutes of the novel. And this without even bothering to pay lip service to the beauty and charm of the woman whose success is the fuel for the fire of Bette's vengefulness. Without Adeline's presence and influence, Bette's envy is pointless. But what else could one expect from screenwriters this illiterate?Next, Siefert and Tarr erased the most fascinating character of the original novel, that of Valerie Marneffe, the middle-class civil servant's wife who is the cause of all of the novel's misfortunes. Valerie was a far more fascinating character than her cinematic replacement, the actress and whore Jenny Cadine. Madame Marneffe's hypocrisy--the truth of her whore's heart disguised by the outward appearance of a virtuous wife--and the complications of her avarice and passion, provided a large part of the entertainment and insight of the novel. Again, Siefert and Tarr have avoided the difficulty of bringing such a multifaceted character to life, simply by cutting her out altogether. Jenny Cadine seems to live for nothing more than a few bouquets of flowers and a pretty dress or two. Not a fraction as compelling.So the characters do not live up to the source material. Neither does the plot, which turns Balzac's masterfully arranged actions and reactions topsy-turvy. Here and there, one may see bits of the original novel struggling to break through--as in Bette's rage when she is told that Wenceslas Steinbock, whom she adores, has secretly entered into a romance with her niece Hortense--but those glimpses are more tragic than anything else, for exposing the greatness that this movie fails miserably to approach.With a series of seemingly natural and inevitable turns of fortune and struggles to escape ruin, Balzac presented a wholly organic portrait of absolute devastation. Siefert and Tarr hope merely to titillate viewers with an exposed female buttock or breast here and there, some pretty costumes and settings, and a few melodramatic situations forced and laughable. Balzac needed no duels to depict rivalry and hatred; he needed no accidental husband-shootings to bring the full force of marital discord home; he needed no sudden descents into madness to prove the ruinousness of deluded obsession. No one hurled dishes to shatter against walls in the novel. No wives were arrested, no sons had to escape from money-lenders promising to "kill your wife and your child" when debts were not paid. Those soap-opera devices weren't necessary in the original novel, because the story itself far surpassed them. But Siefert and Tarr need them merely to dress up an utter narrative failure.Cousin Bette, the movie, may indeed appeal to some viewers, those who ask for nothing but sub-The Young and the Restless melodrama dressed up in period costumes. For those of us hoping for a bit more than that--perhaps simply a semi-faithful adaptation of one of the greatest works of the Western canon--it is simply best to stay away. I certainly should have.

miss_thing So what if this movie reminds of dangerous liasons, or cruel intentions or any other film for that matter! Now-a-days, good luck being completely original, when we live in the era when the Wayans brothers are bringing t.v.s The Munsters to the big screen, Yikes! The hard fact of the matter is that Jessica Lange is AMAZING (as always) and Elizabeth Shue is a delight. I really enjoyed the "Oh what a tangled web we weave" plot line and you will too if you give it a chance. The story is well written, and the performances are effortless. I usually don't care for period pieces and truth be told, I had to be forced to turn this one on...but I WAS SO GLAD I DID. The supporting cast is a hoot as well.