By Slam Hannigan, PhD
Before A Hazard of Hearts, I had never sat myself down to watch an actual early 19th-century period piece. Having never read any Jane Austen, I can only imagine that was what Hazard was shooting for. The final product has a coherent plot, which is more than the Society can say for some of our other movies, but as someone who’s never put on an ascot or entertained guests in a drawing room, there wasn’t much there for me to grab onto.
Except, of course, for the amazingly-named Lord Vulcan, and all the Star Trek jokes I got to fire off as a result of his presence.
The story revolves around the precocious Serena Staverley (a very very early role from none other than Helena Bonham Carter), whose father gambled away his fortune, then the ancestral home, and then Serena herself, before finally taking his life. This doesn’t happen over a period of time, by the way, that all happens in about five minutes. He loses all this to the devious Lord Wrotham, but doesn’t stick around in the land of the living long enough to see the estate and his daughter’s hand won back with a single roll of the dice by the young, gaunt, emotionless Lord Vulcan (who is described as “inhuman” later on by another character, in a way that makes me doubt that wasn’t an intentional wink).
Lord Vulcan has a mother, an overbearing, threatening she-demon who keeps an uncomfortably tight leash on her son. After it’s discovered that she’s paying for silks and brandy to be smuggled in from France, Lord Wrotham tries to get in on that action. In exchange for his financing of the continued smuggling operations, the Lady Vulcan will try to get Wrotham the young Serena. I think. Around this point was where I lost track of much of the plot. Either way, he kidnaps Serena. As he’s about to do uncomfortable things to her, the carriage is stopped by a bandit ex machina, who threatens Wrotham at gunpoint and takes Serena back to Vulcan’s place.
To cut a long story short, Vulcan challenges Wrotham to a duel, Wrotham cheats and flees, but Vulcan survives. He and Serena fall in love finally, and the entire affair culminates with Lady Vulcan being banished, getting stabbed by Wrotham, and Wrotham getting killed in a swordfight with Lord Vulcan. A thrilling and adventurous conclusion to a story that is only really partly concerned with its main character.
Without too much context for the place and time this movie is set, there’s a lot that will seem out of place to viewers like me, but how much of that is because of my unfamiliarity with Jane Austen-style period pieces and how much of that is bad writing is up for debate. Wrotham, for instance, has a memorably hilarious and evil first line as he glowers at Serena from the shade of a tree – “She will be mine!” All his actions after appear to be directed towards that goal, but why a 50 year old man is ruthlessly pursuing a teenage girl, why he seems to get off on humiliating her father, or why he’s such a dick in general are all glossed over and never explained. I can only guess that the acquisition of Serena and her inheritance will increase his standing and power, because that’s what period pieces about the British aristocracy are probably about, but if that’s really his sole motivation, it isn’t clear.
Vulcan’s motivations are even more arcane. Whatever personality he’s supposed to have comes across in jarring alternating scenes where one moment he appears threatning (even brandishing a riding crop and physically imposing himself in front of Serena in a narrow corridor at one point) and the next seems to not give one foppish fuck about his future wife. It’s only in the third act where we start to see him acting with any degree of concern for Serena’s safety, and we can be forgiven at that point for wondering if this is the same dude.
Serena’s character is by far the most interesting, as the movie makes it a clear point to demonstrate early that she’s shrewd, stoic, and even sports a hint of a sarcastic streak. Like a normal person, she has limits to her patience and politesse that are pushed and eventually broken once or twice. Really, the only downside to her character is that she isn’t allowed to do very much, instead acting as a living MacGuffin for the other characters to have a tug-of-war with. Ultimately the only growth/change she goes through by the end of the movie is finally falling for Lord Vulcan. Mind you, this is before the three dead characters that comprise the finale. The wedding, however, is after, and the mood whiplash is pretty real.
Apart from a couple scenes of blatant sexual assault (the second one ending in a pretty egregious case of “it’s not assault if she ends up liking it”) and a few resulting in cold-blooded murder, the movie ends up being a more or less competent narrative, but with more effort put on the set design than on the characters, or why we should care about any of them. Also, for a movie set in the time and place it is, not nearly enough awesome moustaches. Just putting that out there. All in all,
Sunday Night Screening Society 