Interesting to watch... in unfortunate comparison to one of cinema's most vibrant and revolutionary achievements.
Brilliantly cast... if you hadn't already seen certain crazily well-aligned actors mark these roles indelibly as private property.
Lovely to look at... except for the opera scenes, especially the first which is rendered gray by Miroslav Ondricek's unaccountable inability to compensate for candlelight; one who has been in a room lit by a thousand candles refracted in ten thousand crystal facets knows that among the ways it does not appear is dark: see BARRY LYNDON, or a real room lit by a thousand candles. Or, need I say it, DANGEROUS LIAISONS.
But it cannot be said with anything approaching accuracy that this film is well written or well directed. Christopher Hampton and Stephen Frears understood this world and its dramatic imperatives: it is a place of delight, of terror, of reckless drive and perilous whimsy, of, well, danger. In Jean-Claude Carriere's leaden adaptation, the most dangerous element is boredom. The lightness and spark of the source material are doused by clouds of dull black velvet - I kept expecting Elvis to pout from the corners. Every development is so predictable it might have been announced by an oafish footman. Each line is as without poetry as a drunkard's belch. And nearly all performances suffer under a heavy guiding hand, in the form of an atypically cloddish Milos Forman, who crushes into mud the majority of what might have been a frothy little concoction.
Really, it's stunning that anyone could so brutally incapacitate so many actors so inured to bad direction, especially this man who has inspired the best from Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, Howard E Rollins, F Murray Abraham, Woody Harrelson, Jim Carrey, Randy Quaid and Natalie Portman... Forman, who so masterfully wove the works of Joplin and Mozart into the tapestry of storytelling, here even manages to mishandle the orchestrations of Neville Marriner, only allowing him to underscore emotions already blatant in the image.
Nearly every performance, I say, is damaged. 'Twould be folly to write off a cast including Sian Phillips, Jeffrey Jones, Ian McNeice, Vincent Schiavelli and Fabia Drake; many of these stalwarts salvage moments, though led to ruinous obviousness some of the time. But of the primary cast, only Meg Tilly - that precious creature, that perfect angel, who graced leading roles with a career of such baffling brevity - successfully invests her part with consistent subtlety and elegance. Her struggle with cupid is literally breathtaking - hers, mine, certainly Colin Firth's. Her minuet, so dainty and sure-footed even on the verge of a faint, is eloquent discourse on the rapturous despair that is the sole province of any object of forbidden pursuit. Boy, do I miss her.
There are other moments. Henry Thomas' fencing match with Jones is one of the more convincing screen duels - it looks entirely more dangerous than anything Basil Rathbone ever did, athletic as he and Flynn were. Firth's deflowering of Fairuza Balk is sexy, and handled by Carriere and Forman with some delicacy, however disingenuous it appears against Uma Thurman's prosaic rape at the hands of John Malkovich. Firth's horseback archery picnic is pleasant enough, though mostly I'm looking at what he's looking at: Meg Tilly. But Annette Bening, who is in just about every other scene, seems to have thought that to be cast was the entire job. She plays the film with a single facial expression (all teeth and wide eyes), and a single vocal inflection, addressing Regency France with the flat nasal tones of Topeka. For this, Warren, you gave up all that?
Mr Firth has never been a favorite of mine, and while it would be grossly unfair to judge him by contrast with another interpretation of the same role, I think it's within bounds to say that he plays Valmont with the same pretty competence with which he plays everything. When he grins what I'm sure he thinks is wolfishly at the ingénue, he reveals not a predator but a genuinely nice man, miscast. My guess is that Colin Firth knows exactly what to do with a swooning virgin: give her a gentle talking to and a chuck under the chin and taxi fare home to mother. I suspect that in real life he's a paragon of kindness and decency. That, or a far more talented actor than I give him credit for, since I think he's much better cast as the good suitor in bad Renee Zellweger movies.
Brilliantly cast... if you hadn't already seen certain crazily well-aligned actors mark these roles indelibly as private property.
Lovely to look at... except for the opera scenes, especially the first which is rendered gray by Miroslav Ondricek's unaccountable inability to compensate for candlelight; one who has been in a room lit by a thousand candles refracted in ten thousand crystal facets knows that among the ways it does not appear is dark: see BARRY LYNDON, or a real room lit by a thousand candles. Or, need I say it, DANGEROUS LIAISONS.
But it cannot be said with anything approaching accuracy that this film is well written or well directed. Christopher Hampton and Stephen Frears understood this world and its dramatic imperatives: it is a place of delight, of terror, of reckless drive and perilous whimsy, of, well, danger. In Jean-Claude Carriere's leaden adaptation, the most dangerous element is boredom. The lightness and spark of the source material are doused by clouds of dull black velvet - I kept expecting Elvis to pout from the corners. Every development is so predictable it might have been announced by an oafish footman. Each line is as without poetry as a drunkard's belch. And nearly all performances suffer under a heavy guiding hand, in the form of an atypically cloddish Milos Forman, who crushes into mud the majority of what might have been a frothy little concoction.
Really, it's stunning that anyone could so brutally incapacitate so many actors so inured to bad direction, especially this man who has inspired the best from Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, Howard E Rollins, F Murray Abraham, Woody Harrelson, Jim Carrey, Randy Quaid and Natalie Portman... Forman, who so masterfully wove the works of Joplin and Mozart into the tapestry of storytelling, here even manages to mishandle the orchestrations of Neville Marriner, only allowing him to underscore emotions already blatant in the image.
Nearly every performance, I say, is damaged. 'Twould be folly to write off a cast including Sian Phillips, Jeffrey Jones, Ian McNeice, Vincent Schiavelli and Fabia Drake; many of these stalwarts salvage moments, though led to ruinous obviousness some of the time. But of the primary cast, only Meg Tilly - that precious creature, that perfect angel, who graced leading roles with a career of such baffling brevity - successfully invests her part with consistent subtlety and elegance. Her struggle with cupid is literally breathtaking - hers, mine, certainly Colin Firth's. Her minuet, so dainty and sure-footed even on the verge of a faint, is eloquent discourse on the rapturous despair that is the sole province of any object of forbidden pursuit. Boy, do I miss her.
There are other moments. Henry Thomas' fencing match with Jones is one of the more convincing screen duels - it looks entirely more dangerous than anything Basil Rathbone ever did, athletic as he and Flynn were. Firth's deflowering of Fairuza Balk is sexy, and handled by Carriere and Forman with some delicacy, however disingenuous it appears against Uma Thurman's prosaic rape at the hands of John Malkovich. Firth's horseback archery picnic is pleasant enough, though mostly I'm looking at what he's looking at: Meg Tilly. But Annette Bening, who is in just about every other scene, seems to have thought that to be cast was the entire job. She plays the film with a single facial expression (all teeth and wide eyes), and a single vocal inflection, addressing Regency France with the flat nasal tones of Topeka. For this, Warren, you gave up all that?
Mr Firth has never been a favorite of mine, and while it would be grossly unfair to judge him by contrast with another interpretation of the same role, I think it's within bounds to say that he plays Valmont with the same pretty competence with which he plays everything. When he grins what I'm sure he thinks is wolfishly at the ingénue, he reveals not a predator but a genuinely nice man, miscast. My guess is that Colin Firth knows exactly what to do with a swooning virgin: give her a gentle talking to and a chuck under the chin and taxi fare home to mother. I suspect that in real life he's a paragon of kindness and decency. That, or a far more talented actor than I give him credit for, since I think he's much better cast as the good suitor in bad Renee Zellweger movies.