In "Dreaming of Joseph Lees" the phenomenal young British actress Samantha Morton combines romantic dreaminess and sexual hunger in a way that's uniquely hers. There's a will of steel beneath her tremulous surface; she's fierce and vulnerable at the same time. In one scene a drawing teacher (Miriam Margoyles) announces to her class that the female brain is like the female form: soft, changeable. Applied to Morton, that statement is half right -- and half dead-wrong.
In last year's "Under the Skin," as a young woman whose mother's death sends her on a destructive sexual odyssey, Morton made one of the most remarkable movie acting debuts ever. She seemed utterly contemporary. Here, in a period film set in rural England, she's no less immediate. You don't catch Morton feeling her way into the character of Eva. From the opening shot of Eva alone in her bedroom lost in a daydream, Morton seems completely submerged in the role. With her curly bob and long woolen skirts and sweaters, Morton could have stepped out of Life magazine. But the way she's tuned into Eva's interior life dispels any phony nostalgia.
When a title announces we're in 1958 it has an almost Brechtian effect. From the look of Eva's Somerset village it might be 1938. The only glimmer she's ever gotten that life could hold something beyond her job as a secretary in a sawmill or (eventually -- inevitably) marriage came in a long-ago visit from her second cousin Joseph Lees (Rupert Graves). A geologist whose job took him traveling the world, who loved art and books, Joseph became a romantic figure for Eva, and remained so even though her family lost touch with him after he lost his leg in an accident.
Only her weekly drawing classes give her any sense of the world Joseph opened to her. But Eva is too starved for physical attention to live entirely in her dreams. And when Harry (Lee Ross), a local pig farmer, sets his sights on her, Eva finds herself open to his whispers that she's the only local girl "who's never been to heaven and back," or to the way he pulls her into an empty schoolroom after her drawing class to play her Peggy Lee singing "Fever" on his portable phonograph.
Harry is one of those jolly joes who's got nothing going for him besides persistence. Not looks -- his prominent nose and jaw seem like the work of a cartoonist -- and certainly not the same curiosity about the world that Eva has. But on some level Eva is amused by the way Harry sets about wooing her, alternately kidding and beseeching, and drawn to the chance he represents to satisfy her sexual longings. He may be a joker but he's dead serious about her.
So Eva agrees to move in with him but, refusing to surrender her dreams, won't agree to marry him. The awful thing about watching Eva and Harry together is that they're one of those complete mismatches that you can foresee surviving for years; she'll become bitter and tight-lipped over all the ways he's fallen short of her expectations, and he'll act more outwardly jovial in an attempt to convince himself everything is fine, all the while becoming more and more needy. But it's not in Eva's nature to be satisfied with less, and all the desires she's kept under wraps spring to the surface when she encounters Joseph at a family wedding.
Along with Sheryl Lee, Morton is probably the best actress to have emerged in this decade. And like Lee she's absolutely fearless. It's not so much that these women disdain the idea of protecting themselves -- in other words, relying on acting shortcuts and tricks -- it's that the idea of protecting themselves seems never to have occurred to them. Each performance is a walk into the flames, a willingness to follow their characters wherever they lead.
Watching Lee or Morton often makes me feel divided against myself, fearful of what lies in wait for characters so unprotected, and dumbstruck by the courage they show in opening themselves up to the extreme emotional states they navigate with such lyrical clarity.
The conflict Eva faces here -- between duty and desire -- isn't a particularly novel one. So why does it seem that Morton does stuff the movies have never seen before? Partly it's the depth and intensity of Morton's acting, the way every emotion, every reaction seems raw and new. And yet, as in "Under the Skin," she never loses an actor's control.
Here, there's constant tension between Eva's need to express her emotions and her need to control them. Everything she's feeling is visible on her face, and, as with all great interior performances, Morton turns the audience into her confidante. Even her smiles seem to start on the inside and work their way out, as if Eva were no longer capable of holding back her delight. That tension plays throughout the movie -- there's a powerful scene where she's wracked with sobs while trying to steady her voice and speak -- even in Eva's sexuality. The script doesn't really explain why Eva decides to live openly with Harry. But Morton explains it with the unembarrassed blend of pragmatism and idealism that defines Eva.
But even as I write this I suspect that explaining what Morton does here is futile. There are some actors who, when you try to define what they do, only seem more of a mystery, and Morton is one of them. Rather than diminish her with explanation, I'll say what's certain about her: She's one of the most emotionally instinctive actors around, a genius at articulating inchoate emotion, and that the only thing we can expect from her in the future is to be astonished by her.
Both director Eric Styles and screenwriter Catherine Linstrum are making their feature debut with "Dreaming of Joseph Lees" (a terrible title), and it's a clean, solid piece of work. Though the movie is claustrophobic in a way that I don't find particularly pleasurable, Styles and Linstrum have captured the gloom and stasis that settled over post-War England. (The film bears some resemblance to Jim O'Brien's 1989 "The Dressmaker," another period English drama that featured a trio of coruscating performances from Joan Plowright, Billie Whitelaw and Jane Horrocks.)
The filmmakers aren't interested in playing to the Merchant-Ivory crowd; they're not out to stoke anybody's anglophilic nostalgia. The autumnal colors (the movie was shot by Jimmy Dibling) of the rural setting blend right in with the dinginess of the domestic interiors. It's a world that seems incapable of change and yet you can see that it has to.
The movie feels a little unpopulated, possibly because Linstrum's script feels somewhat underdeveloped, and it's grimly humorless, possibly because it's a Gothic. But Styles does fine work with the actors. As Joseph, Rupert Graves has lost the puppyish look that hung about him ever since "A Room With a View"; this is the first time he's seemed to be an adult. He's very good, particularly in the scenes where Joseph is trying to woo Eva while holding himself apart from the stifling family atmosphere he's escaped.
You see what he had to escape when he's embarrassed by an aunt fawning over the "courage" he showed after his accident. As Eva's younger sister Janie, little Lauren Henderson suggests one of those people for whom being a kid is nothing more than a physical condition. She's grounded beyond her years, and her relationship with Morton suggests the way Eva depends on this young girl.
Lee Ross, as Harry, has a particularly tricky role. Mostly, Ross is excellent, conveying the lumpy ardor Harry uses to win Eva, and showing how Harry's honest gracelessness makes him feel inadequate when Eva starts to lose interest in him. The depths to which Harry's neediness drives him is frightening. But Ross' performance suffers the most from the movie's shifting into the mechanics of suspense in the last section. Styles intercuts one too many shots of Harry brooding malevolently with scenes of Eva and Joseph together, and the portents become heavy-handed, obvious. Through no fault of Ross', we lose sympathy for Harry, begin dreading his appearances, in a way that we wouldn't if Styles and Linstrum had compressed the final section.
Somewhere along the way, the filmmakers must have realized that the logical conclusion wouldn't be the satisfying one. That they've opted for the latter shows good sense, a consideration for the audience as well as for their characters and cast. When an actress takes the chances Morton does here, sending Eva off to do her duty would have been just about the most churlish thing imaginable. The filmmakers who use Morton (and she stars next in Woody Allen's "Sweet & Lowdown" and in the film adaptation of Denis Johnson's "Jesus' Son") are going to have to prove themselves worthy of her, as Styles does. Otherwise, they're going to end up toast.
