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
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