What’s less consistently clear in Coixet’s treatment, which irons out most the story’s regional specifics, is what Florence and Violet each stand for in a sociopolitical sense. Violet, for her part, appears to have as little passion for the arts she champions as she does for books, but that’s beside the point: The two women’s tussle over a single dilapidated, damp-afflicted property is really a larger fight for the soul of the town.

“They won’t understand it,” he observes of her book selection, which includes Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” “But that’s all for the best - understanding makes the mind lazy.” Brundish (Bill Nighy), a wifeless, literature-loving recluse who both respects the intellectual enlightenment she’s trying to bring to Hardborough while shrugging it off as a lost cause. But local queen bee Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson, dressed in yards of beige taffeta and a permanent tight smile) announces herself - with utmost civility, naturally - as an opponent to the cause when she airily muses to Florence that perhaps the space could better be used as a local arts center.īattle lines are drawn, and allies are found: in Florence’s case, in her gradual bond with prickly schoolgirl Christine (Honor Kneafsey), whom she hires as a part-time assistant, and in an initially epistolary relationship with Mr. It’s a worthy aim, and on the surface, of course, Florence’s new fellow villagers profess to be delighted by the idea - even if most of them confess to having little interest in reading. (The more tousled Irish coastline stands in for it here, and the subtle difference is felt.) It’s a world of passive-aggressive rules and class barriers hidden in well-trimmed hedges, as humble but headstrong widow Florence Green (Mortimer) soon learns when she moves there, having bought a decaying property - simply named The Old House - that she intends to convert into the town’s first bookstore. Calling on Julie Christie to deliver it is one of the film’s best creative decisions, as her dry, wistful but faintly acerbic tone undercuts the potential coziness of the enterprise, but “The Bookshop” still leans too heavily on her narration in many a scene where clean visual storytelling would do the trick.Īfter all, it’s in unspoken territory where most of the tension of this story lies, beneath the courteous nods, smiles and small-talk exchanges that predominate in the pretty seaside community of Hardborough, Suffolk in 1957. Her adaptation is pretty true to the letter of the novel, too, with substantial extracts of it preserved in a voiceover that remains ambiguous in provenance for much of the film.

Credit Coixet, then, for honoring the spirit of Fitzgerald’s adroit, softly cynical prose, if not its every social nuance.

The bookshop penelope fitzgerald review