½/****
starring Hilary Swank, Simon Baker, Adrien Brody, Jonathan Pryce
screenplay by John Sweet
directed by Charles Shyer
by Walter Chaw Alternately boring and hilarious, The Affair of the Necklace is high cheese of the French Revolution variety, delighted by its own creamery version of ribaldry (there are more stifled titters in Affair than at an Oscar Wilde convention) and infatuated with the passion that ripping bodices has failed to imply for over two centuries. It is inadvertently self-critical (at various points in the film characters breathily intone, “It is amazing how quickly you have become tedious,” or “It is a monument to vanity,” or “The public found her guilty of excess”), and credit is due, I suppose, to poor, gaffed Hilary Swank for being either too daffy to see that irony or a better actress than she appears in concealing any self-aware mirth. The Swank of The Affair of the Necklace is the Swank of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is of course the only Swank, her stunt turn in Boys Don’t Cry notwithstanding. The most astonishing thing about The Affair of the Necklace, though, is how with a cast that includes Brian Cox, Christopher Walken, and Jonathan Pryce, it manages to be jaw-droppingly awful; had I not squirmed in mute horror, transfixed before the film’s appalling majesty, I would not have believed it myself.
