The Dressmaker 6/10
Released: September 23, 2016
By William Rivers
The Dressmaker was an entertaining film, but a very confusing one. I don’t mean Inception confusing, where the story is just so complex that you have to watch it a few times to understand the incredibly deep inner meaning behind ever frame of the film. I mean confusing, as in: “This movie didn’t know what it was supposed to be, and neither did anybody in the audience.” This film’s biggest issue is its tone and lack of a definable genre. IMDB has this movie listed as a Drama, and Wikipedia has it listed as a “Revenge comedy-drama”. For a while there near the end, I was going to consider the film to be a Dark Comedy for this review, but I quickly realized that the reason this movie was so weird and unsettling wasn’t the fact that it was a Dark Comedy and that’s just how it is supposed to be. The reason this film was so hard to swallow was the fact that the pacing is all over the place, and that the film goes from Drama, to quirky Comedy, to Mystery, to Romance and then finally to Dark Comedy in the last 3rd.
The Dressmaker centers on Mrytle ‘Tilly’ Dunnage (Kate Winslet), a former resident of a small town in rural Australia, who has returned to clear her name of a mysterious death that occurred when she was a child. Tilly has spent a good portion of her life travelling the world and designing couture dresses for some of the biggest names in fashion. After having been torn from her mother’s arms and exiled, she returns to find that her mother has since lost all memory of her, along with the dreadful day that ruined her life. It is up to her to discover what really happened and piece together her own memory as well as that of her mother. The people in this town are evil, to say the least, and they want nothing more than to see her and her mother disappear once and for all. However, when Tilly starts making beautiful dresses for some of the women, many of them begin to change their tune.
The film stars Kate Winslet, Judy Davis and Liam Hemsworth, along with a very well cast group of actors in supporting roles. This movie is definitely not held back by performances, even if they are a bit over the top. Everyone here plays their roles just perfectly. You can really feel the stench of hate that surrounds this disgusting little town and you can’t wait to see what Winslet’s character eventually does to punish these people. In this, and in the wonderful cinematography, the film is very successful. What is not so well put together are the motivations of these characters, and the series of events that unfold.
It is difficult to talk about this film and its problems without spoiling it for everyone, so I will boil it down to a few key points. This film has no central driving force. At the beginning you figure that once she discovers what happened to her in the past, everything will be fine and that the movie will end. Later on we start to see that there are two separate romances going on between our leads and between two supporting characters. We also find that there is a plot involving Tilly creating dresses for women in the town, and the men not liking that she is winning their wives over. Somewhere in there is a plot about saving a play that is supposed to be going on soon, and also a plot about an ongoing affair and an illegitimate child. Believe it or not, there is also a whole bunch of death in this movie.
The overarching problem stems from the fact that none of these plot threads really ever fully get resolved, save for the supposed main plot which ends halfway through the second act. You discover what happens in her past, everybody falls in love, and you’re ready to leave the theater thinking you’ve just watched a quirky and very cheesy romantic comedy with a bit of mystery thrown in. Unfortunately all of that quickly changes into a rather depressing, yet somehow still underwhelming set of miserable events and then the movie just ends. You are never able to really feel anything that is happening. Part of that has to do with the pacing, and the other part is the soundtrack.
This film’s soundtrack is all over the place. Happy music plays during serious moments. Upbeat and comedic music plays during dark and shocking events. The plot at times feels like it’s on fast forward or that you’ve skipped a few integral scenes, just before hitting you in the face with something that is supposed to be shocking but never really does the trick for you.
All in all, this movie was entertaining, but not something I will ever voluntarily watch again. It left me scratching my head wondering what even happened and why this story was even important enough to be told, and that really sucks because the performances and the cinematography were so good. There were some major symbolic moments in this film, and I really appreciated the attention to detail that was put into this. It’s just a shame that when it came to the plot and the tone, the producers didn’t seem to care what the audience would be feeling while watching. I have a feeling this movie will become a cult film sooner or later, and people will be trying to explain how, “the plot is disjointed because of how disjointed the lead character’s life is”, or something crazy like that. Quirky film making is not a cover up for sloppy film making, and that’s what this film is: Sloppy.
“Great visuals, but the stitching was a hack job”
The Dressmaker was an entertaining film, but a very confusing one. I don’t mean Inception confusing, where the story is just so complex that you have to watch it a few times to understand the incredibly deep inner meaning behind ever frame of the film. I mean confusing, as in: “This movie didn’t know what it was supposed to be, and neither did anybody in the audience.” This film’s biggest issue is its tone and lack of a definable genre. IMDB has this movie listed as a Drama, and Wikipedia has it listed as a “Revenge comedy-drama”. For a while there near the end, I was going to consider the film to be a Dark Comedy for this review, but I quickly realized that the reason this movie was so weird and unsettling wasn’t the fact that it was a Dark Comedy and that’s just how it is supposed to be. The reason this film was so hard to swallow was the fact that the pacing is all over the place, and that the film goes from Drama, to quirky Comedy, to Mystery, to Romance and then finally to Dark Comedy in the last 3rd. The Dressmaker centers on Mrytle ‘Tilly’ Dunnage (Kate Winslet), a former resident of a small town in rural Australia, who has returned to clear her name of a mysterious death that occurred when she was a child. Tilly has spent a good portion of her life travelling the world and designing couture dresses for some of the biggest names in fashion. After having been torn from her mother’s arms and exiled, she returns to find that her mother has since lost all memory of her, along with the dreadful day that ruined her life. It is up to her to discover what really happened and piece together her own memory as well as that of her mother. The people in this town are evil, to say the least, and they want nothing more than to see her and her mother disappear once and for all. However, when Tilly starts making beautiful dresses for some of the women, many of them begin to change their tune.
The film stars Kate Winslet, Judy Davis and Liam Hemsworth, along with a very well cast group of actors in supporting roles. This movie is definitely not held back by performances, even if they are a bit over the top. Everyone here plays their roles just perfectly. You can really feel the stench of hate that surrounds this disgusting little town and you can’t wait to see what Winslet’s character eventually does to punish these people. In this, and in the wonderful cinematography, the film is very successful. What is not so well put together are the motivations of these characters, and the series of events that unfold.
It is difficult to talk about this film and its problems without spoiling it for everyone, so I will boil it down to a few key points. This film has no central driving force. At the beginning you figure that once she discovers what happened to her in the past, everything will be fine and that the movie will end. Later on we start to see that there are two separate romances going on between our leads and between two supporting characters. We also find that there is a plot involving Tilly creating dresses for women in the town, and the men not liking that she is winning their wives over. Somewhere in there is a plot about saving a play that is supposed to be going on soon, and also a plot about an ongoing affair and an illegitimate child. Believe it or not, there is also a whole bunch of death in this movie.
The overarching problem stems from the fact that none of these plot threads really ever fully get resolved, save for the supposed main plot which ends halfway through the second act. You discover what happens in her past, everybody falls in love, and you’re ready to leave the theater thinking you’ve just watched a quirky and very cheesy romantic comedy with a bit of mystery thrown in. Unfortunately all of that quickly changes into a rather depressing, yet somehow still underwhelming set of miserable events and then the movie just ends. You are never able to really feel anything that is happening. Part of that has to do with the pacing, and the other part is the soundtrack.
This film’s soundtrack is all over the place. Happy music plays during serious moments. Upbeat and comedic music plays during dark and shocking events. The plot at times feels like it’s on fast forward or that you’ve skipped a few integral scenes, just before hitting you in the face with something that is supposed to be shocking but never really does the trick for you.
All in all, this movie was entertaining, but not something I will ever voluntarily watch again. It left me scratching my head wondering what even happened and why this story was even important enough to be told, and that really sucks because the performances and the cinematography were so good. There were some major symbolic moments in this film, and I really appreciated the attention to detail that was put into this. It’s just a shame that when it came to the plot and the tone, the producers didn’t seem to care what the audience would be feeling while watching. I have a feeling this movie will become a cult film sooner or later, and people will be trying to explain how, “the plot is disjointed because of how disjointed the lead character’s life is”, or something crazy like that. Quirky film making is not a cover up for sloppy film making, and that’s what this film is: Sloppy.
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