Film Review: The Chaperone

Drawn from real events in the young life of once-scandalous cult movie star (Mary) Louise Brooks (1906 – 1985), it was obviously a hurried production, with clumsy direction from Michael Engler (a Downton alumni) and a script by Julian Fellowes (also of the series and forthcoming movie) full of phony-sounding dialogue that no one would have said back in the 1920s. Or now, come to that.

In Wichita we meet well-to-do couple Norma (Downton’s Elizabeth McGovern) and Alan Carlisle (Campbell Scott) and sense immediately that they’re not happy, as McGovern quips a lot while Scott does his emotional paralysis routine. They visit the home of society sort Myra Brooks (Adelaide’s own Victoria Hill, also a producer) and watch her daughter Louise (Haley Lu Richardson, also in Five Feet Apart) perform a rather clunky ‘modern’ dance routine.

Impressed, Norma hears that Louise is soon to start studying at a dance school in big, bad New York City and impulsively offers to be the girl’s chaperone, partially to annoy her chilly hubby and partially to do some research into her own shadowy past. Flirty Louise doesn’t think she needs a chaperone and laughs snootily at Norma’s suggestion that “men don’t like candy that’s been unwrapped”, and yet these two very different women find common ground and grow as close as the often-leaden script will allow.

Louise whisks off to learn from Ruth St. Dennis (overacting Miranda Otto) and hit some nightspots, while Norma travels to the orphanage she thinks she grew up in and gets harshly treated by the stereotyped nuns. As compensation, however, she strikes up a friendship with German handyman Joseph Schmidt, and he’s played by Hungarian actor Géza Röhrig (from Son Of Saul) with such gooey niceness and nobleness that you just know they’re going to wind up in bed together (and no spoilers necessary because it’s in the trailer!).

Static and stilted, this is almost worth it for Richardson’s performance, and when she adopts Brooks’ trademark bob hairstyle halfway through, the resemblance is pretty strong. We only catch a few years in Louise’s life though, and aren’t permitted to see her on the set of her most famous film, G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), or glimpse her later years as she grew reclusive, boozy and weird and rudely rejected her culty fame.

That’s for another day – and hopefully another, better movie.

The Chaperone (PG) is in cinemas now