January 14–21, 1999

movie shorts

Hilary and Jackie

The turbulent devotions of a celebrated cellist, fully captured by actress Emily Watson.

by Cindy Fuchs

Directed by Anand Tucker

An October Films release

Recommended

Emily Watson gives another intense, whirling dervish of a performance in Anand Tucker's Hilary and Jackie. Much like the devoted-to-death newlywed she played in 1997's Breaking the Waves, Watson's embodiment of the late, internationally celebrated cellist Jacqueline du Pré is all scary naiveté and raw nerves, upsetting and inspiring. Here she's working from a script by Frank Cottrell Boyce, which is based on a controversial 1997 memoir by Jackie's sister and brother, Hilary and Piers du Pré, entitled A Genius in the Family (controversial because it revealed some nasty facts about the sisters' entanglements that Jackie aficionados considered crude and invasive). Watson brings her own remarkable energies to a frankly dramatized version of a remarkable life, to come up with a series of appalling yet riveting on-screen implosions.

In part such detonation is a function of du Pré's actual life story. A slow-to-blossom prodigy raised in London, she toured internationally during the '60s, married and performed with equally brilliant pianist Daniel Barenboim (the couple was packaged as classical music's version of Camelot), then suffered a breakdown in the early '70s and, at age 28, learned she had multiple sclerosis. (Her 1987 death is not depicted.) This much is surely awful on its face, the stuff that bio-pics and VH1 Behind the Musics are made of. Thankfully, Tucker's film is not as conspicuously manipulative as Shine or as neatly tragic as the Def Leppard Story. In fact, for the first hour or so, you're rather repulsed by the sordid details, even wondering why anyone would put up with Jackie's demanding, turbulent personality.

You're encouraged to resist Jackie, despite her obvious charisma, by the film's unusual structure, which breaks down the sisters' relationship to reveal their mutual instabilities and gnarly jealousies. Neither comes out the straight-up hero. The film introduces their too-close childhood bond with a long distance shot: The two girls are running on a beach, then captured in a nearly desperate embrace, conveyed through the first instance of what turns into an overused circling-camera technique. Then young Jackie sees herself grown up, standing at the edge of the water, with a suitcase: It's a little overstated, but you get the foreboding point.

As they're growing up, the girls do everything together, even appear to read each other's thoughts. But slightly older Hilary (played by Keeley Flanders as a child) is a gifted flutist, Jackie (Auriol Evans) a so-so cellist. Hoping to ensure that they travel and perform together, Jackie works double-time to keep up, and eventually overtakes Hilary, winning local and national prizes. Then Part Two kicks in, marked as "Hilary." From her point of view, Jackie is fast becoming a schizzy superstar, painfully selfish. Almost in self-defense, Hilary (played as a grownup by Rachel Griffiths, from Muriel's Wedding) gives up performing to marry a kindly music teacher, Kiffer (David Morrissey). They retire to the countryside where they raise children and farm creatures, work hard and thoroughly enjoy each other.

Jackie's appearance at their muddy utopia is odd (she's a bit hysterical) but by nightfall, she shows her utter wackiness. Worse, Hilary, after understandable protest from her husband, agrees to Jackie's plea to let her sleep with her husband, believing that poor dear Jackie only needs to know she's loved. This completely uncomfortable arrangement continues for some months. Resentment develops on all sides. Finally, Jackie leaves, and it's time for Part Three.

At this time, Jackie's driving forces begin to come clearer—if not precisely, at least compellingly. Fittingly, much of her delirium is focused through her instrument. The imagery is both glorious and gruesome. When she wraps her legs around the cello (a priceless Stradivarius), it's as if she and the thing possess each other, like they're mutually enraptured and aroused. She speaks to it, it sings through her. At one point, they lie side by side on the floor of a Moscow hotel room, and she apologizes for leaving it outside in the snow during one of her frequent attacks of peevishness. "Sorry I treated you so badly," she whispers. She's bereft, more moved than you see her anywhere else.

Such deep feeling, you realize, is behind her several afflictions, so willfully denied by everyone around her (or, in the case of her sister, absorbed by her). The cello remains loyal, serving as her voice, companion, object of her displaced affections and erotic obsessions. The film doesn't show everyone who calls her "genius," who encourages her immaturity, ignorance and irresponsibility (neither does it show much of her brother, Piers, the memoir's co-author curiously turned into an occasional background element). It focuses instead on rather abstracted effects of celebrity (you can imagine Michael Jackson identifying with these characters, even if you don't) and, to an extent, a singular, severely bizarre sisterhood.

It's surprisingly nonjudgmental about the latter. Indeed, it seems almost to let both principals off the hook (and how does Kiffer deal with all this and its fallout?). But this is one of the yucky rubs that makes the film so intriguing.