Purple thru & thru

Rating: 1/10 (23 March 2003)

This movie is so overblown with its own importance that even the hype when it was released was hailing Julia Ormond as the greatest screen actress since Ingrid Bergman. Unfortunately she seems to be giving not so much of a performance as a rehearsal for an Oscar acceptance speech, and that's pretty much the tone of the whole enterprise: self-conscious. It's also overly melodramatic, improbable, contrived, ridiculous, overemotional, schmaltzy, and irrelevant to any real issue. All synonyms to the above words apply. I love a good absorbing screen drama, but this is borderline psychotic.