A strange person comes to (an also strange) town and teaches the set-in-their-ways locals how to live and love in the new fairytale film Chocolat. Well, no, it’s called Wicker, but Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer’s film does bear a faint resemblance to that Lasse Hallström confection of a past movie era, as it does to plenty of other films about a fish-out-of-water charmingly affecting their adopted community. Which isn’t to ding Wicker; while there is plenty of originality to be found in this spritely fable, it’s also nice to see something old-fashioned at a festival so commonly associated with envelope-pushing modernity.
That said, Wicker might have been something of a scandal back in the days of Chocolat, what with its frequent, bawdy talk of sex, of body parts and fluids and fetishes. The film, based on the short story “The Wicker Husband” by Ursula Wills, is decidedly for grown-ups, despite its fanciful whimsy, a cuteness that risks becoming cloying but never quite does. The mundane disappointments and insecurities of adult life are chief on the movie’s mind, matters of marriage and longing that Wilson and Fischer handle with a winning mix of irreverence and compassion.
Wicker
The Bottom Line
And you thought your husband was stiff!
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
Cast: Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgard, Elizabeth Debicki
Directors and writers: Eleanor Wilson, Alex Huston Fischer
1 hour 45 minutes
Olivia Colman, dirty of face and garment, plays a loner fisherwoman in a rural village in what looks to be somewhere in 1600s England. But it’s not really England, or really any specific time. This other-earth has customs and mores all its own: a wedding ritual that involves the placing of a metal collar around the bride’s neck, a habit of naming people solely after their profession (Elizabeth Debicki plays Tailor’s Wife née Doctor’s Daughter, for example), and a rather credulous approach to magic.
That last part is crucial to Wicker’s story, in which Fisherwoman asks the local reclusive Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage) to build her a husband made of the titular material. Her neighbors are taken aback when this patio chair-made man strides into their lives, but they rather quickly accept his existence — even if they don’t like it.
Part of their problem with this hulking pile of sticks is that he’s played by Alexander Skarsgard, and thus is something of a rattan Adonis. That makes the men of the village uncomfortable, and their wives, well, uncomfortable in an altogether different way. The wicker man is also seen being gracious, helpful, kind to his wife. He’s an excellent, tireless lover and handy around the house. Which puts all the other husbands to shame and disrupts the social order of this cloistered, paternalistic place. Debicki’s prim queen-bee is perhaps most bothered by these developments, appalled that her former punching bag has found — or ordered — the perfect man.
The ordered part, the transactional aspect of the wicker husband’s existence and Fisherwoman’s dawning love for him, does mar the romance of the film some. Wilson and Fischer try to soften that origin story; the Basket Weaver insists that his creation has his own free will. But one doesn’t really buy that, not when he seems so singularly programmed to cater to the Fisherwoman’s every need (both in the bedroom and around the house).
Still, there is something sweet in this union of misfits, largely because Skarsgard and Colman do so much to sell it. Colman especially resonates as Fisherwoman tentatively sets her fierce independence aside and entrusts her heart to another, knowing he could so easily break it. Ah, the terrible perils of coupling.
What’s most engaging about the film, though, is its social survey, tracking the wicker husband’s effects on various townsfolk, from the ribald to the, well, fatal. Wicker is, essentially, a social treatise on equal partnership, urging husbands of any time, in any place to be mindful of their spouse’s needs, to find joy in their joy, comfort in their comfort. It’s a nice, if not terribly novel, sentiment, one delivered with peppery wit as Wicker bounces along, occasionally pausing for a moment of deeper feeling.
The film has lovely tailoring, from its carefully saturated cinematography from The Brutalist Oscar winner Lol Crowley to Renátó Cseh’s detailed production design. Each actor in the cast — which also includes Marli Siu, Nabhaan Rizwan, and, for a brief moment, Richard E. Grant — is nicely in tune with the film’s cadence, its complex curlicues of language. Wilson and Fischer, whose last film was the well-regarded Sundance horror-comedy Save Yourselves!, have a firm command of this weird little ecosystem — they hold the reins just tightly enough to keep things in harmony, but not so much that the film becomes formally rigid.
Perhaps the ending — in which a lesson is imparted, as one must be in a fable — drags on a tad too long, but otherwise Wicker is a warming, sometimes poignant pleasure, a film full of lively personality and possessed of a rather humane outlook on our petty foibles. It is not exactly forgiving, though; the movie has a harder, more merciless edge than one might expect. But I suppose that’s somewhat apt for our squalid present tense, in which so many of our own fellow townspeople seem to be digging in their heels and refusing to evolve. Their loss, Wicker says with a tart and withering smile.
