Top-Notch Actor Jonathan Pryce’s Performance In ‘Carrington’ Is Reason Enough To See This Movie

Dora Carrington was a boyish, little-known and inexorably ill-fated British painter who existed on the edges of the Bloomsbury group of English artists of the early part of the century.

She is best known today for her largely one-sided love affair with openly gay author Lytton Strachey, who wrote one best seller, “Eminent Victorians,” and is a footnote in English literary history of the ‘20s.

Now they’re the subject of Christopher Hampton’s much-acclaimed biopic “Carrington.”

Hampton’s film, which chronicles their romance from 1915 to 1932, mixes a minimum of psychological motivation and background detail with a maximum of bedroom scenes and showy dramatics. It’s been raking up awards at film festivals all over the world, but it is minimalist biography at its most extreme.

The film opens as Carrington (Emma Thompson) meets Strachey (Jonathan Pryce) at a friend’s home on the south coast of England. The two recognize a certain common bond of Bohemian eccentricity, become friends and - after she watches Strachey appear before a conscription tribunal and bravely refuse to serve in World War I - form a platonic but semiromantic relationship.

Over the next 17 years, this relationship becomes the one constant in their lives. They often live together, serve as each other’s artistic supporters, and become spiritual lovers - even while she has her physical lovers, he has his physical lovers, and, at one point, they even share a lover or two.

It’s a strange and increasingly sad tale. As Strachey becomes famous as an author in the 1920s, his sense of self-importance and penchant for younger and more shallow lovers seem to preoccupy him. Carrington finds less satisfaction in anything but his company, finally deciding she cannot live without it.

As a biography, the film is fairly empty. It tells us nothing about Carrington’s family background or career as a painter and communicates little about her psychological makeup.

Nor is there anything in Thompson’s performance to fill in what is not in Hampton’s script. Her Carrington is opaque, enigmatic and perverse without any suggestion of what might be special at her core. There is certainly nothing to explain why the thin, bearded, very snobbish Strachey became the all-consuming passion of her life.

As a first-time director, Hampton - a playwright noted for “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” and “Sunset Boulevard” - has not aimed especially high. This is by-the-numbers Merchant-Ivory/Masterpiece Theater-style filmmaking, with considerably more sex scenes than is biographically necessary, and most of the drama reduced to a narrow line: the plight of a straight woman hopelessly in love with a gay man.

The one place “Carrington” scores a bull’s eye is in Pryce’s performance as Strachey. He makes the character come eerily alive and linger vividly in the mind. By far the best thing Pryce has done, the role has already won him the best-actor nod at Cannes and made him an Oscar front-runner. Pryce’s performance is reason enough to see this otherwise less-than-satisfying biography.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: “CARRINGTON” Location: Newport cinemas Credits: Directed and written by Christopher Hampton; starring Emma Thompson, Jonathan Pryce, Steven Waddington, Penelope Wilton Running time: 2:02 Rating: R