Hysteria, a disappointingly limp ode to the invention of the vibrator, plays like a Merchant Ivory Production of Portnoy’s Complaint. Watching it, you’d never know that this revolutionary discovery, by allowing women to pleasure themselves, hammered a crucial nail into the coffin of 19th-century patriarchy. A boon to bluestockings and unsatisfied wives alike, the device rocked sexual politics, even if its full repercussions were not immediately understood.
Director Tanya Wexler couldn’t care less. Her focus is on the delicate funny bones of art house audiences, and to that end, her film has been buffed and tweaked into a coy, heavily costumed farce. At its center is the plush waiting room of acclaimed physician Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce, bored to death), in which a steady stream of affluent, agitated ladies await treatment for a nonexistent condition known as “hysteria.” Blamed vaguely on an “overactive uterus,” the diagnosis, which clung to the medical books until 1952, offered a convenient escape hatch for sexually incompetent husbands.
The good doctor, however, has discovered a treatment guaranteed to encourage regular weekly appointments. Coating his fingers in a variety of essential oils, he manipulates his grateful patients’ neglected anatomies until they reward him with a “paroxysm” and depart flushed, breathless and with tiny hats askew.
But all this therapeutic diddling is taking its toll on the old man’s digits: On the verge of carpal tunnel syndrome, he enlists the help of young Dr. Granville (Hugh Dancy), a modern-minded physician looking for a change from the leeches and filth of London hospitals.
Sugaring the deal are Dalrymple’s two daughters, one dutiful (Felicity Jones) and one rebellious (Maggie Gyllenhaal); the latter, a budding suffragette, busies herself with a home for unfortunate women and their raggedy kids. What either woman would want with Granville, an effete twerp, is unclear, but soon they’re pushing themselves at him while he pushes business through the roof. And when his fingers, too, are no longer able to perform, enter Edmund St. John Smythe (Rupert Everett, looking as though he’s in witness protection), Granville’s benefactor and — fancy that! — an inventor.
