Tamara Drewe Movie Review
Review by spiritualityandpractice
Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton) is a celebrity newspaper columnist who has just returned to her family’s estate in the Dorset countryside in England. Once the source of ridicule because of her large nose, she is the beneficiary of plastic surgery which has transformed her into a raving beauty. Her presence stirs up the stodgy place where two bored teenagers Casey (Charlotte Christie) and Jody (Jessica Barden) do what they can to cause as much trouble and disorder as possible: they throw eggs at Tamara’s car when she arrives in the sleepy town of Ewedown. The other regulars are best-selling thriller author Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam) and his long-suffering wife Beth (Tamsin Greig) who run a writers retreat. Nicholas is a seasoned adulterer with a penchant for young women who are attracted to him because of the allure of literary success. When once again he hurts Beth with his philandering, she turns to Glen (Bill Camp), an American academic who is slaving away on a book about Thomas Hardy.
Review by dailymail
Thomas Hardy was not exactly a merry old soul, but this film turns his period romance Far From The Madding Crowd into a sexy frolic that’s like a frenzied coupling of Richard Curtis and Jilly Cooper.
The tale ran for two years as a comic strip in The Guardian, written by Posy Simmonds as a saucier version of The Archers, or a less homicidal Midsomer Murders.
Moira Buffini has done a solid job of turning it into a frothy farce that is -like all Stephen Frears’s films – extremely well-acted.
Review by ft
Tamara Drewe is a broadly faithful adaptation of Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel, itself an unfaithful and impudent adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel Far From the Madding Crowd. That in turn took its title from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. We are a long way from Gray’s “Elegy” when the film’s newspaper columnist heroine (Gemma Arterton) cruises back into the Dorset village where she grew up with Lily Allen’s song “The Fear” blaring from the speakers of her Mini. Tamara’s journey is interrupted by a windscreen-egging perpetrated by Jodie (Jessica Barden) and Casey (Charlotte Christie), a pair of foul-mouthed 15-year-olds who serve as the film’s chorus and as catalysts for its intricate plot.
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