Based on the promotional material and marketing campaign for Sofia Coppola’s new film The Beguiled, one might expect a salacious thriller full of southern hospitality, period costumes, and scheming women. What you might not expect is comedy.
To be clear, The Beguiled is by no means a lighthearted comedy. In fact, the story itself is really quite dark. The movie follows the events that take place after the women residing at a small school in rural Virginia take in a wounded Union soldier during the Civil War. What unfolds is a sinister tale of desire, manipulation, and betrayal.
Writer and director Sofia Coppola develops the story and characters with exacting restraint; nothing is done in excess and no detail is out of place. This precision extends to the film’s tone, which is neither overly grim nor unrealistically bright.
Instead, The Beguiled uses comedic elements to give the movie a biting wit and boiling energy that help balance the film’s darker, more violent and dramatic elements.
I’ve seen The Beguiled twice and both audiences I watched with were incredibly responsive to the film. There were lots of gasps and excited whispers, as well as bursts of laughter.
What struck me is how the audience’s laughter was rarely, if ever, elicited by a traditional joke. In fact, if you read the lines and moments that triggered the laughter on paper, it’s likely you wouldn’t laugh at all.
The performances in the film are key to understanding how The Beguiled makes the audience laugh. Under Coppola’s direction, all the actors — particularly, but not limited to, Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning — are able to turn things that might otherwise be overlooked into really sharp, funny moments.
The actors achieve this through a combination of slight verbal cues and body language. By layering a raised eyebrow, a well-timed smirk, an intense glare, or a suggestive side-eye onto the top of a line of dialogue, the actors add a separate language to the story.
This secondary language, one that is entirely nonverbal, communicates far more than the characters themselves can or would express verbally.
For example, after Corporal McBurney, or “McB” (Colin Farrell), arrives in the home, the girls start dressing differently. One morning, Ms. Martha (Kidman) compliments Edwina’s (Dunst) necklace.
The line itself is entirely harmless and seemingly genuine, but Kidman’s eyes and hovering glance communicate a very sarcastic judgement that caused the audience to laugh.
In another scene, an apple pie is shared at the dinner table and McB comments on how much he likes it. Then, the women at the table engage in a series of comments about the pie — who made it, whose recipe it was, who picked the apples, and so on.
The entire conversation would play much differently if not for the snide and sarcastic way the actors read the lines. In this way, Coppola uses the actors to derive humor in scenes that would otherwise play much differently.
As I was leaving the theater after the movie, I overheard someone commenting on the audience’s reaction to the film. They said that they felt the laughter was condescending and hurt the movie. I had a much different takeaway.
The comedic elements in The Beguiled work to invest the audience in the story, making them conspirators alongside the women in the film.
Therefore, the laughter is a process of identification; by telling the story of The Beguiled from the point of view of the women (an important change from original 1971 film), Coppola is inviting the audience to be complicit in the characters’ actions, rather than demonize them.
Since the characters in the story are not particularly likable, asking the audience to identify with them is not an easy task. The use of comedy makes it easier for the audience to invest in these characters and empathize with their actions. Comedy is wound tightly to vulnerability, making it a perfect tool to assist with identification.
The moments when the audience laughs are instances when the characters are revealing their own insecurities and frustrations. This is an essential tool, particularly as the film enters its last act and the women turn against McB.
Moreover, laughter is often indicative of a certain level of discomfort and tension within the audience that they do not have another way to release.
Coppola is conscious of this; watching a group of women plot to kill a man who is terrorizing them is not easy to watch or accept. By using comedic elements in combination with this tense drama, Coppola gives the audience a way to accept the character’s actions without entirely endorsing them.
None of this is to say that The Beguiled makes light of the story it tells.
More than any other film Sofia Coppola has made, The Beguiled is a clear statement about the relationship between men and women, and how, in a society dominated by men, women are seen as objects. The Beguiled makes a strong commentary on how men are kind to women insofar as it suits them.
It’s only after McB is made an object that he turns against the women and his manipulation is revealed. The comedy in the film does nothing to take away from this narrative.
In fact, it adds to it by encouraging the audience to identify with the women and creating a strong layer of nonverbal communication within the film. The comedy, rather than take away anything from the film, gives The Beguiled the extra charm that pushes it over the edge and makes it something truly special.