Bel Ami ☆☆½

So I wanted to review this film because it has been getting a bit of lambasting by the critics and fellow Lovefilm subscribers, some of which is deserved but I feel like I need to stick up for it a bit.

Yes I said stick up for it even though I feel it is still half a star from being 'worth watching' in my rating system. Basically there are some fundamentals that are wrong with this film, namely the script and editing, but there are also positives.

So, like an evaluation of an employee we shall begin with a positive, move on to the negative, and round off with another positive.

Robert Pattinson's performance in this is really very good. The trouble is his smile is so genuine that it breaks out all over his face - not many actors can smile quite that wide, in fact I can only think of people such as Michael Palin whose smile lights up his face, but then that isn't in an acting capacity. So because I have seen him smile so genuinely in interviews and such, when I see him smile in this I am removed from the film and do not see Georges but Robert smiling on screen. Destroys the illusion somewhat.
Apart from the smile though, he does very well as the foolish young man determined to make money through screwing important women.

And this is where I begin with the negatives. The character of Georges was abhorrent. Truly, there was only a couple of times that I felt sorry for him but the rest? No, young man got much more than he deserved and if only he'd been grateful I might have connected with the character.
As for the women: Uma Thurman was fine but for the script and direction she was given; Kristen Scott Thomas is SO MUCH BETTER than the character she was lumped with who was stupid and obsessive; and Christina Ricci had a character that didn't make many good decisions but was by far the best of the three.

It did not surprise me to learn that the directors (two of them, generally bad news and probably why it wasn't quite so cohesive as it could have been) had only one or two previous film making credits which accounts for the uncertainty in places of where the story is going and how it is being framed. At first I thought it was going to be the memories of Pattinson as he contemplates how he came to be so miserable, and then it stopped referencing those dark moments and lost that thread completely.
I'm sure the book was salacious and riveting, indeed the French version of the film has almost two stars more than this one so perhaps something gets lost in translation. However the screen writer has been responsible for two episodes of Lark Rise to Candleford (a deathly boring series that started so well but then KEPT GOING) and her next credit is for the Inspector Morse spin off Lewis...hardly naked bodies in the bedroom fare which may be why Bel Ami wasn't quite so French as it should have been.

But to end on a positive then I would have easily turned this film off had it not been for the exchanges between Ricci and Pattinson. They had more chemistry than the other pairings and were much more enjoyable to watch. I really like Ricci, she and Elijah Wood have this youthful quality to both their appearance and acting but can still command the screen with emotion. I loved the game of tag that Pattinson plays with Ricci and her daughter because it felt like a genuine moment.

So yeah, it needed a LOT of work to make it worth a watch but, because I like Ricci and am always willing to let Pattinson show off better acting than frowning constantly with heavy white make-up, I don't regret my decision to watch Bel Ami. I just wish it had been better.