Gemma Arterton as Tamara Drewe

Director Stephen Frears has made such rewarding and remarkably dissimilar films as "My Beautiful Laundrette," "Dangerous Liaisons," "The Grifters," "Dirty Pretty Things" and "The Queen."

A lot of talented performers have done their cleanest, truest work in a Frears film: John Cusack in "The Grifters," for example, or Michelle Pfeiffer in "Dangerous Liaisons."

What do these pictures have in common, besides a modest, well-spent budget ("Liaisons" being the plushest of that group)? Wit. An unaffected air of honesty, whatever the genre. An astute way of laying out a given societal power structure, focusing on the human beings either trying to stay in power or trying to find a way in.

What these films do not have in common is a rigorous or immediately identifiable visual style. This isn't necessarily a handicap unless you're dealing with, say, Frears' latest, "Tamara Drewe." It comes from a Posy Simmonds graphic novel (originally serialized in The Guardian), in which a bewitching, sexually adventurous gossip columnist returns to her family's provincial English cottage and turns a neighboring writers' colony upside down with her fabulousness.

It's extremely witty on the page. Simmonds, whose earlier work includes "Gemma Bovary," riffs freely on Thomas Hardy's "Far From the Madding Crowd," and as Tamara -- a head-turner since she underwent a nose job -- juggles three suitors and various sensual intrigues, an entire subculture comes to teeming comic life.

Onscreen it comes to ... half-life, or perhaps three-fifths. The adaptation wrestles the picture book's dense, sprawling detail into manageable form. Here and there, tentatively, Frears and his design team approximate the pictorial flourishes of the graphic novel. But the ensemble appears to be guessing, much of the time, at a proper performance pitch. Gemma Arterton's Tamara is fine, as is Luke Evans as the local hunky handyman. But they seem hemmed in by their archetypes. Bill Camp, primarily known for his solid stage work, comes off as indistinct yet overeager as the visiting American professor working on his Hardy book (a nice touch by screenwriter Moira Buffini).

The movie makes a key audience-identification character (Beth, the hard-working hostess and long-suffering wife of a philandering novelist) more passive. It's not the performer's fault; Tamsin Greig is quite good, as is Roger Allam as the weaselly adulterer. But without setting a style for the material, Frears' casual, feel-your-way-through visual approach goes only so far to activating the fizz.

Still, it's easy to watch. I laughed at such exchanges as the city mistress saying to the country novelist: "I thought you wanted to be with me!" His hush-hush reply: "In London!" And then, for clarification: "Now and then."

 

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"Tamara Drewe" Movie Trailer

 

 

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MPAA rating: R (for language and some sexuality).

Running time: 1:51.

Cast: Gemma Arterton (Tamara Drewe); Roger Allam (Nicholas Hardiment); Tamsin Greig (Beth Hardiment); Luke Evans (Andy Cobb); Bill Camp (Glen); Dominic Cooper (Ben); Charlotte Christie (Casey); Jessica Barden (Jody).

Credits: Directed by Stephen Frears; written by Moira Buffini, based on the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds; produced by Alison Owen, Paul Trijbits and Tracey Seaward. A Sony Pictures Classics release.