A Little Chaos (12A)

three stars

Dir: Alan Rickman

With: Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Stanley Tucci

Runtime: 117 minutes

IN a few weeks the MI5 television drama Spooks capitalises on its small screen popularity to become a full blown feature film in cinemas. It is a clever move on the part of the George Smiley set, but wily old Alan Rickman has rather beaten them to the punch with A Little Chaos, his big screen homage to The Beechgrove Garden.

Okay, not really. This Kate Winslet-led tale of Louis XIV's building of the gardens at Versailles does not feature Jim McColl leading a car chase through a vegetable plot, or Carole Baxter lurking in the ornamental grasses, ready to pounce like a Ninja on any foes who threaten the staking in the herbaceous border. But strip away the surface elements and general period drama hoo-ha and one has what the likes of Beechgrove Garden, Gardeners' World, Antiques Roadshow and the rest of their ilk offer - an oasis of easy viewing. If that is what you are after in a cinema visit this weekend, fill your welly boots here.

A Little Chaos is Rickman's second film as director. The first was the rather fine 1997 drama The Winter Guest, set in Scotland and starring Emma Thompson and Phyllida Law. If 18 years sounds like a long time between gigs, it should be noted that Mr Rickman has been busy on the acting front. As he told the GFT audience at the Glasgow Film Festival premiere of A Little Chaos in February, "something called Harry Potter" got in the way. Never mind, he is here now with a pleasant period piece that only stumbles when it reaches for a seriousness beyond its grasp and the tone it has already set for itself.

Much in the same way as The Winter Guest, A Little Chaos is about the ties that bind us to each other and the past. It is Paris, 1862, and the King (played by Rickman; there have to be some advantages to being director) has a new, fabulous palace at Versailles. Desiring gardens similarly fit for a monarch, he instructs his chief landscape architect Andre Le Notre (Matthias Shoenaerts) to hold interviews. Madame Sabine De Barra (Winslet) is a rarity among her fellow horticulturists. Not only is she a woman, gasp, but she has lots of new fangled ideas about moving away from order in a garden and embracing chaos. Not a lot, just a little, as she demonstrates by daringly moving a planted container six inches.

Rickman digs deep into the gardening theme and comes up with several ideas to throw around. He explores a woman's place in a male-dominated society, mankind's desire to tame nature, the bliss and savagery of the natural world. Where the film comes into its own, however, is when he leaves the muck and shovels behind and enters the gilded and perfumed court. Until the palace intrigue begins A Little Chaos is the stuff of polite smiles. But when Stanley Tucci shows up, all cattier than thou, the humour level lifts immeasurably. The only thing wrong with Tucci's performance is that there simply isn't enough of it. Rickman, too, is clearly having fun as the sarky, rather than merry, monarch.

The shenanigans at court are so moreish that it is a drag when the tale switches back to Madame De Barra and her efforts to build a concert space in the grounds through clever use of banked hedging. Fascinating stuff, if you like that sort of thing, but it is not as much fun as Tucci in full sail or Helen McCrory devouring the part of a Machiavellian wife. The same goes for the budding friendship between De Barra and Le Notre. Later, as if trying to overcompensate for the earlier lightness of tone, the plot unwisely takes a detour into bleaker territory. It is too much, too late, and fits awkwardly with what has gone before.

Though a trifle dull at times, there is still more than enough here to make one hope that it will not be another 18 years before Rickman steps behind the camera again. Harry Potter willing, of course.