Most of Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe is so breezily entertaining, and so bracingly clear-eyed about what total pains in the asses writers can be, that its final 15 minutes feel like an all-wrong slap in the face. That's not completely Frears' fault -- he's essentially being true to the source material, Posy Simmonds' 2007 graphic novel of the same name, about marital misbehavior, deception and dueling egos at a writer's colony in the English countryside. Still, the movie's ending leaves a sour tone that Simmonds' book -- a tart-tongued story accompanied by beautifully soft-colored, naturalistic drawings -- somehow deftly avoids. That doesn't make Tamara Drewe a complete failure as a movie. But it does raise some questions about how even a relatively faithful film adaptation can go off the rails by hitting a few wrong notes, simply in the way particular moments are re-created or framed. A filmmaker can get almost everything right, and still, in the last 15 minutes, pretty much blow the whole thing to bits.
The key figure in Tamara Drewe isn't the title character (more on her later): It's Beth Hardiment (Tamsin Greig), a mousy, middle-aged wife and mum who's devoted to running a writers' retreat and caring for her arrogant, hotshot novelist husband, Nicholas (Roger Allam). Beth is a bit of a doormat: She's organized her life around Nicholas' career, helping him invent his most enduring characters, bringing him elaborate midday snacks, and keeping his current projects, as well as his professional life, in good order, page by page. For years, she's also looked the other way as he's conducted numerous extramarital affairs. She's good at that sort of thing, because she understands the fragile, crotchety nature of writer-type people, which is what makes the retreat such a success: One pudgy, earnest American academic, Glen (Bill Camp), finds the atmosphere particularly freeing, and he develops a crush on Beth, too. At last it looks as if he'll be able to finish his epic study of Thomas Hardy. (Simmonds' book was inspired by Far from the Madding Crowd, and you can see the resemblance in certain plot points.)
Things go haywire when a formerly gawky girl, now a great beauty (thanks in part to a nose job), returns to the village, temporarily taking over her ancestral home -- which is right next door to the writers' colony -- until she can sell it off. The arrival of Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton) stirs up trouble for everyone, especially Andy (Luke Evans), the sweet, swarthy farmhand whom Beth has come to rely on: He has a long history with the Drewe family, and with Tamara, too. Ambitious, saucy and massively insensitive to others' feelings, Tamara attracts or, more accurately, causes all kinds of chaos. To begin with, she takes up with a sullen, heavily eyeliner'ed rock star (Dominic Cooper), whose arrival in the village incites two bored teenage girls (played, winningly, by Jessica Barden and Charlotte Christie) to get up to some pretty damaging mischief.
Frears does a terrific job of keeping these characters' myriad petty interests and grand longings in play, and it doesn't hurt that the picture -- shot by Ben Davis -- is gorgeously comforting to look at (even though you'd have to be a true dimwit to shoot a picture in the English countryside and make it look ugly). Some of the performances are completely enjoyable to watch: Beth may be a pushover, but she's a pushover of great character, and Greig gives her enough dimension and energy so that she never becomes tiresome. And Camp is marvelous as the timid but brainy Glen, a man who senses, wisely, that even seemingly placid-looking cows can really be creatures of great menace: Even domesticated beasts can't fully shed their full animal nature.
But the ending of Tamara Drewe attempts to cap off an amusing ensemble comedy with a sub-Hardy level of tragic drama, and Frears can't make it work. In her book, Simmonds has the luxury of using page after page to work up to that tragedy (and then she doubles back on it, showing it from another viewpoint). But movies, by their nature, need to be more compact, and in condensing the story's conclusion, Frears (working from a screenplay by Moira Buffini) manages to hit most of the wrong notes. Tamara Drewe starts out as the kind of movie you think you might be able to send your friends to, and ends up one you're not sure you'd send anyone to. One character, in particular, dies a horrible death, and Frears, as experienced a director as he is (he made the Queen of England seem like a real human being, for God's sake), can't navigate the tone shift gracefully -- in the space of a minute the movie goes all wobbly and never recovers. What's more, dog lovers should know that a canine character, a lively boxer named Boss, meets a bad end as the result of his owner's inability (or unwillingness) to control him. Such terrible things happen in Hardy, too. The difference is that Hardy's vision of all creatures in the natural landscape had to be unsparing; Frears is just making a tragicomedy. There's so much less -- and yet more -- at stake.