Hysteria (2011, R)

I heard about this movie a while back and was intrigued, but the deal wasn’t clinched until I realized it starred Hugh Dancy (Will from Hannibal.)  It’s not everything I hoped it would be, but it’s still a charming, entertaining historical rom-com – if it has a major fault, it’s that the somewhat formulaic plot doesn’t quite live up to its truth-is-stranger-than-fiction premise.

Our story takes us to Victorian England, land of the repressed, and London is suffering from an epidemic of “hysteria,” the vague diagnosis for any number of female complaints.  Its symptoms range from anxiety to melancholy to irascibility to insomnia, and the general idea is that the lady parts of the afflicted women are making them act crazy (ie, not the good, placid Victorian women they’re supposed to be.)  Mortimer Granville, a young doctor who’s been bounced from half the hospitals in London for his radical ideas like germ theory, finds his way to the private practice of a doctor who specializes in hysteria.  He’s found that by applying “pelvic massages” (yeah,) he can “induce” hysterical “paroxysms” (yep,) and provide his patients some temporary relief/release.  Mortimer joins the practice with dedication, but his heavy caseload soon results in carpal tunnel (that’s right.)  Fortunately, an inventor friend of his has been working on an electric feather duster, and Mortimer thinks he can adapt it for medical use (mmm hmmm.)

So, yeah, the vibrator was invented in Victorian England as a time-(and hand-)saving tool to treat hysteria.  That’s 100% true, although the movie itself is a pretty fictionalized account of the whole business.  Mortimer is of course young and handsome but super uptight, and the doctor he works for of course has two beautiful daughters:  one is a demure “angel of the house” while the other is a fiery suffragist who angers her wealthy father by “wasting” her time serving the poor.  Wanna guess which one Mortimer initially falls for and which one he ends up with?  Sure, all of that is fairly predictable, but it’s still a romantic comedy about the invention of the vibrator in Victorian England, and how is that not made of win?

What there is to like about this movie is pretty great.  It shamelessly mocks the small-minded view that this “treatment” is purely medical, the male doctors assuming by rote that women don’t really have sexual feelings, and certainly not without the aid of their husbands.  It shows the damage done by the whole idea of hysteria as a medical condition, the thought that a woman was at the mercy of her uterus.  It has fun with cutting-edge Victorian technology (Mortimer’s inventor buddy has just installed a telephone,) and it loves to force all the squeamish Victorians to face up to the idea of sex.

Hugh Dancy does a great job with Mortimer – his devotion to medical reform, his enthusiasm for his new work, and his journey to greater understanding of women and their inner lives.  Felicity Jones (Catherine Moreland from Northanger Abbey, more recently of The Theory of Everything) plays the docile daughter while Maggie Gyllenhaal is the irrepressible one, and film also features Jonathan Pryce, Rupert Everett, Ashley Jensen (Maggie from Extras,) and Anna Chancellor.

Warnings

Sexual content – no intercourse, but tons of manual and mechanical “pelvic massages” (all the pertinent “parts” are hidden by a curtain) – and thematic elements.