WINTER'S TALE
Tuesday, February 11, 2014 at 11:16AM Stars: Colin Farrell, Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Jessica Brown Findlay, William Hurt, Eva Marie Saint, Mckayla Twiggs, Ripley Sobo and Will Smith.
Writer: Akiva Goldsman; based upon the novel by Mark Helprin.
Director: Akiva Goldsman.
Rating: 2/5
Although not the first time that fantasy that soared on the page lands with a thud on the screen, Akiva Goldsman’s take on the ‘magical realism’ of Mark Helprin’s vast, dense 1983 novel Winter’s Tale will prove particularly plodding to those unfamiliar with the source material and wanly lacking in wonder to those that are.
Having survived early embarrassment (Batman Forever; Batman & Robin; Lost in Space) to emerge as Hollywood’s go-to-guy for high-end B-movies (A Beautiful Mind; Cinderella Man; The Da Vinci Code), Goldsman’s directorial debut proves an epic folly, exposing the Oscar winner as a filmmaker more enthused by the aesthetics of Helprin’s novel than its heart. One can’t begrudge him the structure of his script, which jettisons long passages and entire characters and mashes familiar elements from the 750-page tome, but fans will deem it unforgivable that the romantic essence and compelling momentum are missing.
Goldsman focuses in on Peter Lake (Colin Farrell), the main character from the first section of Helprin’s book. The petty thief/larrikin is on the run from the seething Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe), a brutal overseer of New York’s tougher burroughs at the turn of the century. They were once allies, but Lake is now marked for death by Soames, whom we come to understand is a demonic minion working for ‘Judge’, aka Lucifer, (Will Smith, in a jarringly misjudged piece of stunt casting).
Having escaped on a white steed (Athansor in the novel, with its own lengthy narrative attached, though none of that detail survived the transition), Lake is convinced by the horse (?) to pull of one last act of petty thieving. And so he meets the consumptive beauty Beverly Penn (Jessica Brown Findlay), with whom he forms a spiritual passion. The third act transplants our hero into modern-day New York, where he stumbles the streets in amnesic stupor, ingratiates himself all too easily into the life of journalist Virginia Gamely (Jennifer Connelly) and her sick daughter Abby (Ripley Sobo) and faces off against Pearly.
In his scripts for Practical Magic, I Robot and I Am Legend, Goldsman hinted at otherworldly aspects of earthbound romanticism; in this regard, his script for Winter’s Tale echoes his new-agey contemporaries Michael Tolkin (The Rapture) and Bruce Joel Rubin (Brainstorm; My Life; Ghost; Jacob’s Ladder; The Time Traveller’s Wife). Oddly, it is these themes of existential spirituality and divine fate that so profoundly burden the film. Goldsman desperately wants to honour these elements in the most grand of cinematic traditions but forgets to craft character arcs and personalities that audience can engage with. His wordy script, in which long passages of cumbersome dialogue supplant excised plotting and hoped-for depth and illogicality undermines credibility, makes for a very long 129 minutes.
Nothing indicates the desired prestige status more clearly than the front-loading of above-the-line Oscar winners. Crowe continues his voyage into ‘late-career Brando’ self-parody, his Pearly a truly nutty characterisation complete with often impenetrable Irish brogue and showy monologuing (which is not to say he doesn’t also offer up some of the film’s livelier moments); Connelly is entirely underserved. Past Academy honourees William Hurt and Eva Marie Saint class up smaller parts, while composer Hans Zimmer’s blustery score works hard if largely in vain to wring emotion from every frame.
One highpoint from this otherwise disappointing effort is the risky roll of the dice it represented for Warners Bros. Some courageous backing of difficult literary projects once thought 'unfilmable' has come from their LA boardrooms of late; the Wachowski’s stunning, unfairly-ignored adaptation of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Baz Luhrmann’s love/hate spin on F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and now Goldman’s effort. One hopes the rocky box office path the films have trod doesn’t deter further investment in book-smart Hollywood cinema.
Reader Comments (7)
The critic is obviously someone who is incapable of true love and childish wonder. Dare to dream and see the poetry in this film. Your bitterness within your own heart is too apparent in your review.
I can't take this review seriously. He can't even spell the author's name correctly. It's Mark HELPRIN.
The incorrect spelling of the author's name has been corrected. Apologies to Mr Helprin.
It looks like all the comments above were the same person.
Thank God a typo was corrected. It was apparently completely ruining Silemay's take on the entire review.
And Padrespatti (please, no one dismiss my opinion if I misspelled that!) that's quite a jump, to say the reviewer has apparent "bitterness" and is "incapable of true love" because he finds a film to be poorly made. You sound like you're either a) secretly the director or b) the kind of person who loved a novel (or maybe a particular actor) and once either of them made it to the screen, you didn't care about how well the whole thing turned out. People who are genuinely filled with "childish wonder" often say "nanny nanny boo boo" to naysayers.
I had just recently read this book and after reading it, it does not surprise me in the least that it appears to be a flop. There is so much detail and secondary plot in the novel that it would be impossible to do it justice as far as fitting things in. Which brings me to my next point, achieving the kind of mystical aspects of the book and applying it to the film, it can't be done in my opinion. Some stories are better left in novel format, they simply cannot be done on screen. Thank god Salinger did not sell the movie rights to Catcher in the Rye.
You mention Gatsby at the end... wonder how Luhrman would have handled Winter's Tale. One of the things I loved about his Gatsby is that he took the source material and adapted it to the medium... he didn't just slavishly translate it. I thought that enabled him to get the soul of the story of Gatsby in ways other versions haven't. In the case of Winter's Tale ...such a dense, wonderful novel seems an impossible task without the Lord of the Rings/multiple movies treatment or some kind of Luhrman like re-imagining. I will still go see it... just disappointed to read this as I have loved ones who are not the readers I am who I had hoped to share my love of the story with.