Compliance Movie Review

In the early 1960’s Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment that had subjects administering what they believed were electric shocks to a third party at the behest of an authority figure in a lab coat. It was ostensibly an attempt to discover if millions of people throughout Europe who aided in committing the atrocities of the Holocaust could actually have simply been following orders that conflicted with their own sense of morality. What is a human’s natural response to a person in a authority and how far would we go before standing up to such a person? Milgram’s findings, which were later confirmed in further studies in different parts of the world, were troubling and revealed a side of human nature that should make most people uncomfortable. It turned out a large majority of the subjects were willing and ready to cause bodily harm to another person because they were told to do so.

Tamara Drewe Movie Review: Stephen Frears Attempts Classic British Farce

Gemma Arterton as Tamara Drewe makes heads turn

Stephen Frears is no stranger to directing films that find notes of humor in dark subject matter. The Hit, The Grifters, and even to some extent High Fidelity, all comfortably juxtapose the two moods. His latest film, Tamara Drewe, is an uncomfortable melding of comedy into serious drama. I’m not sure he’s entirely pulled it off here.

It’s the story of the goings-on in a small village called Ewedown in the English countryside. There, Beth and Nicholas Hardiment (Tamsin Greig and Roger Allam) run a quaint hideaway for writers from all around to get “far from the madding crowd,” as their sign out front proclaims. And wouldn’t you know it, but an American writer has taken up residence there to complete his Thomas Hardy book. As (bad) luck would have it, this little spot is also anything but far from the madding crowd. With the high jinks that go on it’s a wonder that Nicholas can manage to crank out another in a series of popular detective novels year after year. Perhaps it’s his shameless philandering with a younger woman that gets him through. The screenplay was written by Moira Buffini based on a serial comic strip by Posy Simmonds. The comic strip itself is based on Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd.