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In The Affair Of The Necklace, Swank does it again with a difference. In Boys Don't Cry, her womanly assets were strapped down. In this period drama, they're strapped up and out.
But she's still harbouring a secret not visible to the naked eye.
Comtesse Jeanne De La Motte-Valois is a woman on a mission, a social climber with a cause at the court of France's King Louis XV and Queen Marie Antoinette. Like an 18th-Century Scarlett O'Hara, she's pledged to get back her family's stolen land and honourable name by any means necessary.
After a few awkward attempts -- fainting at the feet of the frivolous queen (Joely Richardson) is likely to get one a heel mark on the back, but not a sympathetic audience -- she's taken under the wing of a court rogue.
Retaux de Villete (Simon Baker, in pancake makeup and lip liner) is a renowned romancer of older, richer woman for their pleasure and his gain. In Jeanne, he sees something of himself and takes up her cause, making her over and educating her as to court intrigues and the uses to which such knowledge may be put.
A fast learner but blinded to danger by her determination, Jeanne devises an elaborate plot involving the Queen, the corrupt, sexually-debauched Cardinal of all France (Jonathan Pryce, suitably skin-crawly) and the most valuable diamond necklace ever made.
Cue many, many clandestine meetings. Gaze on several too many handsomely overdecorated great rooms.
There are horses and corsets and quail hunts, and very, very occasionally, a glimpse of what life is like at the time for the regular people in Paris. Those peeks are awfully inviting, compared to the airless atmosphere of the world of the so-called nobility. Not even the repeated flashbacks of the specific horrors done to Jeanne and her family can make us fully feel for her cause. The society she so longs to be a part of is repulsive, morally bereft.
Dialogue swells like overstuffed bodices, and moments such as Christopher Walken in ham-and-a-half mode as a Russian mystic with Don King hair and a Boris Badenov accent approach burlesque.
The intrigue is stretched out long beyond when it remains intriguing and it all grows quite dull. There's so much fairytale narration by the monarch's house minister Baron de Bretuil (Brian Cox), you'll wish you could slam shut the book.
Still, Swank has the stuff to carry a movie, even one this bad. Like Jeanne, she seems happily oblivious to the disasters unfolding around her. She plunges ahead, chin up, a plucky heroine giving her best and unaware she's hitched her star to such sorry company. (More on: The Affair Of The Necklace).
(This film is rated AA)