SCORNED by most higher-brow reviewers, Carrington is a film I have a soft spot for. The playwright and scenarist Christopher Hampton has simplified and slightly sanitized the life of the painter Dora Carrington—her unrequited and unquenchable passion for the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey, and her other friendships, affairs, and marriage—but since even that brings in most of Bloomsbury, he could not delve deep below the surfaces. Yet, as his own director, he has striven for authenticity, using actual locations whenever possible, getting actors to look like the people they are portraying, and faithfully re-creating Carrington’s and other Bloomsbury art work.
The film does have a somewhat unreal quality because it is told in brief, often disjointed scenes, and because it tends to dispense with extras: the characters who matter are largely left alone with their ideas, feelings, relationships, and talk, talk, talk. For me, this suffices, especially as subtly photographed by Denis Lenoir. As Strachey, Jonathan Pryce gives a performance that is idiomatic, zesty, finely textured, and, because wholly unsentimental, profoundly moving. Emma Thompson, though hardly the childlike and apple-cheeked creature Dora Carrington was, conveys those tomboyish qualities impressively in a performance scarcely behind Pryce’s. The others are apt, too; only Rufus Sewell overacts the tempestuous painter and Dora-lover Mark Gertler.
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