Germs. They’re tiny creatures that invade the body… You can’t see them, they’re invisible.
A bit of a departure from my usual movie taste. I thought it was going to be a dirty comedy. Turns out it’s a romantic comedy. Not my thing.
This is a fictional account of the invention of the vibrator in the Victorian era. The young and idealistic Dr Granville has just been fired again from a hospital for his new fangled notion of ‘germs.’ Desperate, he takes up a position with Dr Dalrymple (the awesome Jonathan Pryce!), the foremost expert on hysteria in London. Hysteria is a blanket term used for any woman who isn’t the perfect, docile, obedient housewife. So, yeah, Dalrymple has lots of patients. His treatment? Oh, it’s highly popular, involving massaging hands in the lady’s ‘delicate’ areas. Granville, being young and strong, with accordingly STRONG hands, becomes very popular and this leads to what appears to be carpal tunnel. He can no longer treat the women in the practice and Dalrymple has to fire him, to the dismay of his younger daughter, Emily. There is an older Dalrymple daughter, Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who is supposed to be some suffragette and bleeding heart crusader for women and the poor. Granville ends up at his wealthy gaddabout friend Edmund’s house (a criminally underused Rupert Everett) and notices his friend’s experiments with electricity. Specifically, a feather duster attached to a handle and Granville notices the pleasing vibration the handle gives off. When some modifications, Granville thinks this could revolutionize women’s medicine and get him his job back. They hire a maid (who also moonlights as a hooker) from Dalrymple’s house to test the new contraption on. She has some misgivings, and I don’t blame her. The contraption (which has yet to be named) looks like a futuristic ray gun and is attached to an electric engine, a novelty and a possible danger back then. But hot damn if she doesn’t love it! It’s time to bring it to Dalrymple!
And then the movie goes on. Just some crap about it being accepted, blah blah. There’s a subplot that becomes THE plot eventually about women’s rights, the poor, etc, centred around Charlotte. The parts with the vibrator are pretty funny and there’s a lot of good one liners, but it just doesn’t save the movie. The slightly dirty comedy turns into a drama. I guess they had to make up some kind of crisis/conflict/something because they just couldn’t think of anything else to fill the time. I didn’t give a damn about Charlotte, her charity or her mission. It felt tacked on. Like if you were watching Super Troopers but halfway through it turned into The Manchurian Candidate. I kept wanting to fast forward past the parts with Charlotte and her drama, which meant that I would only have seen about half of the movie. And I would have been okay with that. I understand how they were trying to tie in the vibrator and hysteria to women’s rights, but that was not the movie I was looking for.
1 creme brulee out of 5 (there were some really good one liners, especially about germs!)
dessertforlunch 