A whole lot less than the sum of its parts.

Rating: 6/10 (3 February 2004)

Not a bad film. Not a good film either. All that talent just never manages to jell into something substantial..
The main fault lies with the screenplay. Whatever charms the novel might have held were mostly lost in the translation. Supporting characters never stick around long enough to justify their presence - the hermit lady who heals Inman, for instance, adds nothing to the story line or theme that is not added elsewhere. With sparse dialogue and introverted main characters the script fails to invent ways to reveal their inner lives in ways that we really care about. And after 2.5 hours we really should care what befalls them at the end.
Despite the massive promotion as the year's masterpiece the film just doesn't deliver the goods, and, to their rare credit, most critics and Academy members were able to see that behind all that sizzle there wasn't a whole lot of meat. But then again it did manage to get Jude Law and Rene Z. oscar nominations and neither perfornance particularily shouts out for such recognition.