Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert was notorious for the glacial pace of his writing -- a pace that allowed him to commit to paper some of the most gorgeous prose ever composed.

Extreme slowness of pace in writing, or even in a novel, is probably a good thing. For the author, it allows time for a full realization of craft; for the reader, a slow pace doesn't necessarily mean a boring read. When it comes to adapting a novel (built on words) to the screen (where image is key), a director and her team have to be clued in to the essentials of the story to such an extent that they can identify and, in a sense, rebuild that story's themes and relationships in service of a different medium.

Unfortunately, that doesn't happen with the newest film version of "Madame Bovary," helmed by Sophie Barthes. The story is pretty easy to grasp: Emma Bovary (Mia Wasikowska) is married off to a doctor (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) and accompanies him to his village, where she lapses into a tedium-induced funk from which she is only sporadically revived by shopping and extramarital affairs.

For the former, she's got the slimy, predatory Monsieur Lheureux (Rhys Ifans), who foists his expensive clothing, furniture, and knick-knacks on Emma with the skill of a seducer, smoothly introducing her the idea of credit without explaining its perils. Before long, he's guided Emma to the point of bankrupting her husband.

For the latter, she's got vacuous pretty-boy Leon (Ezra Miller), who describes his jaunts to picturesque places with the phrasing of a third-rate poet. (To culture-starved Emma, his trite words are nectar.) Then there's the swaggering, stag-killing Marquis (Logan Marshall-Green), to whom Emma is one more majestic creature to be bagged. (Poor Emma is too naive to see through his posturings and realize that however macho a guy might be on the hunting expedition, when in private he turns out to be more shrill and girly than the girl herself, well honey, that girl needs nothing from him.)

Had Emma ever heard of feminism, she might have the ghost of a chance at finding her way. But as it is, she's an ambitious young woman in a time when men had a monopoly on ambition; it's impossibly frustrating for Emma to find that her husband has no ambition, and worse to discover than when she does succeed (along with Charles' colleague, Monsieur Homais (Paul Giamatti) in getting him to perform a daring surgical procedure on a young man with a club foot, his surgical skills are not the stuff of legend.

Wasikowska delivers a magnificent performance; her Emma is reckless and selfish, but somehow without malice. When her own mistakes catch up to her and she's let down by the various men in her life, she derides men in general as "evil," but that's not quite true. They are simply as lost as she is -- without the benefit of her willfulness and daring.

The problem is the film's pacing, which all too literally delivers to the audience Emma's sense of boredom, unfilled time, and potential draining away. Things only brighten up -- emotionally, energetically, and cinematically, -- when the Marquis appears, a good third of the way in. But his is a transient splash of sunshine; the rest is costume porn and superficial gesture, style decoupled from substance with meaning and pathos surfacing only erratically.

What's really jarring, though, is that all the trappings aside, nothing about the direction or the performances convinces us that these are 19th century French people. In tone and affect, this film screams contemporary America. Maybe that's a jab at our shallow, materialistic society, but we can get that from any number of indie flicks. Why mount such a stylistically lavish production only to fail at evoking a place and time that feels different from our own?

The Blu-ray release offers no special features to entice buyers, leaving the home video connoisseur to wonder -- as did the cinema ticket buyer -- why he should bother. If costume porn is your thing, have at it; if you're looking for literature on film, this "Madame Bovary" isn't going to do it.