The Chaperone is an adaptation of a novel about the titular character, Norma, a financially comfortable married woman whose children are grown. Louise Brooks of silent film fame is going to New York City to take a class at a major dance company and possibly get an opportunity to join the troupe, but at sixteen years old, she is too young to go alone. Norma seizes the opportunity to accompany Brooks and uses this time to do some soul searching about her past and what she wants her future to be like.
The cast elevates The Chaperone from Sunday night television movie status, but you can feel the story struggling to pull it back. A lot of narrative developments seem too convenient and pat, which makes it feel more like a fairy tale and less rooted in reality. It starts with a narrative trope that I despise, the how we got here opening scene set in 1946, which we return to and resume at the end of the movie. The majority of the film unfolds in 1922 with Norma having occasional flashbacks signaled in the palette change depending on the emotional temperature of the scene or the solidity of the memory: black and white, oversaturated or just a shade lighter than the present scenes, which are very warm and colorful.
The majority of The Chaperone follows Norma, but occasionally diverts its focus when Brooks is in the dance studio; however her point of view is never represented unless she explicitly expresses it in conversations with other characters. Instead the film uses others’ reactions to her, specifically the married couple who run the studio, as the real way that the audience engages her. I suppose that is a useful technique if you want to avoid the displeasure of her estate and litigious interested parties, but then I would be a ruthless filmmaker and just follow Norma because the dance studio intrigue goes nowhere after a lot of set up and foreboding.
The Chaperone is possibly the Green Book of feminism, and moviegoers hoping for the movie to devote more time to Brooks will be disappointed. It could be called Touched By Brooks. It handles a lot of issues quite simplistically. When we meet Norma, she is depicted as someone quite progressive compared to her peers, but given what we learn about her from the flashbacks, I wish that we had more of a sense of whether or not Norma was always like that, or if it was a rebellious phase in reaction to a devastating epiphany about her life. In comparison to Brooks, her attitudes about race, sex, drinking, clothes and appropriate social behavior are quite provincial. Norma ends up questioning and rethinking a lot of her feminist beliefs then decides to embrace life fully instead of living according to some random rules that only she is enforcing. The resulting life would be considered quite scandalous for that time, but is fairly tame for our time.
The Chaperone alludes to numerous provocative cultural and political touchstones such as the Magdalene asylums or laundries, but more as a backdrop to Norma’s personal journey of self-discovery. Cataclysmic moments are treated as a backdrop used to make the character more interesting then abruptly abadoned once it has fulfilled its purpose, which makes the film a light, entertaining film, but could anger some movie goers who expect that the character will be more substantially changed. The movie and the moviegoer gets their signals crossed because introducing such historically charged institutions signals that the story may go in one direction, but it never intended to, and I don’t know how to prevent those misinterpretations except not to make such loaded references. A filmmaker can’t expect that audiences will know enough to understand what they are, but not the potentially damaging implications. After two hours and thirty-four minutes of watching Peterloo, an incredibly political movie, I was in the ideal mood for a palette cleanser, which this movie provided so while I didn’t sign a waiver, I wanted to skim along the surface like a stone, but for others, it may put the film in danger of sinking. It is a rose colored period piece whose aim is to make you feel warm and pleased, not riled up and ready to agitate for broader change than the personal.
Elizabeth McGovern is at the helm of The Chaperone, and I loved her depiction of Norma. In another actor’s hands, a viewer could end up hating her, but she makes it work. I loved Haley Lu Richardson in Columbus and Support the Girls. She does what she can with what she is given, but she has to share some of the blame with the filmmakers because whenever anyone reacted to her dancing as if it was a revelation, I could not relate. I understood their feelings theoretically, but felt nothing. After Dakota Johnson’s performance in Suspiria, which is an incredibly different film, every actor has to step his or her game up when it comes to acting as if you are a potentially a professional dancer because I felt chills whenever Johnson moved, and I was never a fan or even a real follower before seeing the remake of the horror classic whereas I adore Richardson and still failed to be moved by her movements. Step your game up, people!
Geza Rohrig plays a major supporting role and imbues so much warmth and gentleness in The Chaperone that he overshadows the normally effervescent, sensitive and nuanced performance by Richardson. I read that his dialogue was dubbed. I didn’t notice, which may make me spectacularly untrustworthy and dense if it is true, but I would normally react with nothing except derision and eye rolls to his storyline (hint: I’ve only seen the previews for The Aftermath) yet he made me want to believe the triteness. He kind of steals the movie from the ladies. There is something so grounded in his performance that it makes the movie feel credible instead of making you feel incredulous. He felt vaguely familiar, and I did see Son of Saul, which he starred in, but I don’t remember him per se. I think that I may now.
If you’re looking for an inoffensive, entertaining film, then I highly recommend The Chaperone, which is suitable for all viewers unless they are extremely conservative. It is always a pleasure to have a film with a woman in the lead, I just wish that it didn’t play it so safe and perhaps cut out or add more to improve the flow of the story because even though no threads are truly dangling, it does feel as if the movie forgot to return to some events that it alluded to earlier.
