Up at the Villa

The great upheavals of the 20th century, to judge from Tea with Mussolini, The Last September, and now Philip Haas's perfunctory adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novella Up in the Villa, merely provided the backdrop for the unwise affairs of overheated women in fading mansions. Here, Fascist Italy and the onset of war nicely set off the fine teeth and cheekbones of Mary Panton (a gaunt Kristin Scott Thomas, scarcely recovered from The English Patient), a penniless British widow housesitting the title Florentine villa who's given a second chance when bloodless bureaucrat Edgar Swift (a sour James Fox) pops the question. Before she can accept, however, Mary is wooed by ne'er-do-well Rowley Flint (Sean Penn, who looks a bit like Cagney or Garfield but sounds like Sean Penn), Fascist functionary Beppino Leopardi (Massimo Ghini), and Karl Richter (Jeremy Davies), a desperate political refugee. This last pairing toys with genuine pathos before degenerating into the creaky stage business of a melodrama involving an inconvenient corpse, switched guns, and incriminating documents.

-- Peter Keough