Starring: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson
The daughter of an African slave and a British aristocrat (Matthew Goode), Dido Belle Lindsay (Lauren Julien-Box, Mbatha-Raw) is raised under the care of her uncle, Lord Mansfield (Wilkinson) one of the foremost judges in British law. Brought up around high society, Dido faces discrimination due to her mixed race and her disapproval of the rigid system in which she lives at a time when a case of a slave ship is brought to court that could change the cause of slavery abolition in Britain.
It took seven years for director Amma Asante to bring the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle to the big screen. Inspired by a portrait housed in Scone Palace depicting her and her white cousin Elizabeth Murray as equals at a time when non-whites in portraiture were depicted as looking at white people in admiration, Belle is a handsome film that falters into some of the problems with costume dramas but does bring with it a rare passion and spirit.
Central to this the strong leading performance by Gugu Mbatha-Raw. A role as complicated as this requires a great deal of range which Mbatha-Raw displays skilfully. Tom Wilkinson is the second most prominent player in the cast and he commands the screen whenever he is present as well. Emily Watson as Dido's adoptive mother figure is rather under-explored, a fate shared to a lesser extent with Watson's role in The Book Thief earlier this year. Penelope Wilton is eminently enjoyable a sharp-witted faded debutante whilst Miranda Richardson and Tom Felton go into almost panto mode as a thoroughly unlikable and racist duo (put together with an also under-explored James Norton whilst Sam Reid makes a number of impassioned declarations against slavery.
The film is polished and romanticised to within an inch of its life and it's clear a lot of effort has been put forth and it conjures up notions of Jane Austen and the Brontës that at least makes for glamorous proceedings. The dialogue is a little more troublesome. The anachronistic language and the plot's dependency of a social system that virtually doesn't exist anymore mean that the film can be hard to follow but the strong sense of a central plot and the way Asante takes us through it means that the ideas at the core of the story shine through.
All in all, Belle is probably not going to make any new fans of the detractors of costume dramas but it is slightly above the average for films of its ilk and if you feel that you mY enjoy it, it's worth checking out.
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