3 Stars
Rated: Unrated (full nudity)
Trailer:
From IMDB: When Lucy Honeychurch and chaperone Charlotte Bartlett find themselves in Florence with rooms without views, fellow guests Mr Emerson and son George step in to remedy the situation. Meeting the Emersons could change Lucy’s life forever but, once back in England, how will her experiences in Tuscany affect her marriage plans?
Le sigh. I was excited to watch this movie as it was highly recommended to me. I can’t even really put my finger on why I didn’t like it much.
The acting was great. You take one look at the cast, see names like Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Daniel Day Lewis and Helena Bonham Carter and you know that acting is going to be excellent. I have no qualms about the cast. I was surprised to LOVE Helena Bonham Carter’s performance as a young ingénue, rather than a psychotic woman. Dench and Smith were brilliant as always.
(see what I did there?)
I think the problem for me was that it felt that there was very little driving the story. It was sort of like, Yes, we all know that she’s SUPPOSED to love George, but she’s forcing herself to be with Cecil because that’s the SENSIBLE thing to do. And DUH she’s going to get with George at the end. But even with that drama I didn’t really feel the struggle, the strain towards any sort of dramatic action. Lucy just kind of traipsed around, George practically assaults her in a field in Italy (alright, it’s romantic, but he really does kind of attack her) and then she’s like, I’m going to go home and marry boring Cecil. YES. That sounds marvelous. I don’t even remember there being a good reason NOT to marry George. Like, most period movies there’s some really depressing reason why they can’t get married, but I don’t remember one here. Which made the “conflict” that much more ridiculous to me.
AND then very little happens until the end when she’s like I’VE BEEN LYING TO EVERYONE, INCLUDING MYSELF I LOVE GEORGE BLAH BLAH and the audience is like, yeah, we saw that five minutes into the movie.
So I liked the general idea of her having all this passion for life and it only coming out through music and then finally in her love for George, but that still didn’t seem to move the movie along as much as I wanted it to.
Oh, and every time Mr. Emerson (Denholm Elliot) was on the screen, all I could think about was Indiana Jones (he played Dr. Marcus Brody).