The movie is hardly reverent of Sylvie—I think that like the sustains a fundamentally undecided, distant perspective on her. Tolerant, perhaps, but not entirely forgiving. Both
Jim Emerson's and
Dave Kehr's original reviews of the film get at this quite well. Both suggest that another, more conventional film might be made of this material: one in which Sylvie's charming noncomformity is valorized as against the snooty, propriety-obsessed townsfolk. But Forsyth's
Housekeeping is defiantly
not that film. I think the scene where the church ladies come visit is a case in point; it's probably the part of the film that most tends to this kind of facile dichotomy, but it's undercut by a moment of genuine pathos from one of the visitors, and ends more ambiguously than one might expect. Similarly, even in his passive-aggressiveness, it's easy to sympathize with the sheriff's concern for Ruthie. I definitely don't think the film is meant to end on a sanguine note; I believe we're supposed to be genuinely concerned for Ruthie's fate. In that way and others it reminds me of the ending of
Days of Heaven.
But my admiration for this film goes way beyond just its ability to retain the book's haunting ambivalence toward Sylvia. There's such a profound sense here (to invoke a phrase Malick might appreciate) of the
thingness of things, of the strangeness and specialness of the world. Again, it's a miracle that Forsyth's film should capture that most elusive aspect of Robinson's extremely dense and often difficult book. Not to pit one film against another, but I think that the limpidity of Forsyth's filmmaking here, its apparent effortlessness (which of course was far from effortless), is a key to this achievement, as against the constant straining for lyrical revelations in Malick's most recent features.
