Patricia Clarkson’s Grand Hauteur in The Bookshop

Patricia Clarkson is getting used to playing villains. If you’ve been watching Sharp Objects, the HBO thriller in 8-parts that will have its final episode this coming Sunday, you’ve seen this actress from New Orleans at her sinister best, a matriarch called Adora who is anything but adorable; her name alone exudes irony. Clarkson wears her bad side with high hauteur, an elegance and beauty that goes icy as human emotions draw near: it is impossible to turn away from her. In a new movie, The Bookshop, a lovely take by Isabel Coixet on Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, starring Emily Mortimer, Clarkson continues in craven glamor. Bill Nighy’s character calls her behavior regarding the takeover of a bookstore repulsive. Clarkson says her acting strategy for playing hideous is to channel Glinda, the Good Witch.

When Clarkson tells you, as she did this past weekend at a special screening sponsored by the Hamptons International Film Festival and Purist Magazine in East Hampton, that her role is simply a cameo, don’t believe her. She wants to focus instead on Emily Mortimer’s starring role. Clarkson passed the script to Mortimer’s husband Alessandro Nivola when they were on Broadway together in Elephant Man, hoping Mortimer would say yes. Clarkson promises she plays a hero in her next movie, to premiere in Toronto: “I’m a cop in Out of Blue,” based on Martin Amis’ novel, Night Train, “and I don’t even look like a woman in it,” she adds, proud of her starring role as a detective.

Emily Mortimer joined Clarkson and director Isabel Coixet at Dopo La Spiaggia with many who had just seen the movie, among them Aida Turturro, Bob Balaban, Alessandro Nivola and their kids. Mortimer is simply sublime in The Bookshop, a gorgeous film, in which the novel Lolita, in its original Olympia Press 2-volume edition, is a prop.

Regina Weinreich

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