Fast-forward/laugh - fast-forward/laugh

Rating: 2/10 (19 July 2009)

To put it bluntly, this film is a virulent mess. I mean, who would've thunk it? After Joe Wright's shimmering triumphs in "Pride and Prejudice" and "Charles II: The Power and the Passion"? And this cast? And this Ian McEwan storyline worthy of Graham Greene? And a Best Picture BAFTA?
It stinks, and here's how it apparently happened. Wright's florid cinematics worked well in his earlier two enterprises because of the strengths of the characters and the compelling story lines that held a great deal of interest via action and resulting character development. In this film, we find a context of greater introversion and subtlety, and the hope was that Wright would tone things down a little. Instead, he goes the opposite way, attempting to create a singular grafting of camera and musical themes (including typewriter key sounds) that defines rather than underpins the film.
Joe Wright is not Darren Aranovsky, however. And ultimately, the result is gratingly self-conscious and infuriatingly pretentious, consistently turning scenes into deflating "look-at-this" exercises. And if this isn't enough, Wright attempts to turn the story into an cinematic "epic", apparently wishing to rival "The English Patient" and "For Whom The Bell Tolls" in scope and detail. McEwan's story doesn't lend itself well to this treatment, so the film collapses under massively detailed expositions of WWII and other events that contribute nothing to the story. The expositions themselves don't even ring true, and the plot's final twist almost seems anticlimactic under all of that weight.
Ultimately, my distaste for the enterprise led me into the fast-forward/laugh mode - fast-forwarding through the endless yawning pits of the superfluous landscape while laughing at the overall lost motivation of the film. I haven't done this with a major motion picture since "Braveheart", but with "Braveheart", I was laughing at the film's unintentionally hilarious content, not at its overall motivations.
2 Stars, and hopefully the nadir of a very talented director's career.