Post by Capo on Dec 6, 2008 17:38:43 GMT
Good premise, but disappointing.
It's easy to see why this might have appealed as an adaptation - I've not read the novel, but as a story about note-taking and keeping secrets to oneself via diary form, it seems promising and rich. Ultimately, the would-be richness doesn't really translate as well as it could.
Perhaps if it had started at the end, with Sheba discovering Barbara's diaries, it might have been a fascinating and complex unravelling of secrets, voiced retroactively by the reader with the writer in mind. But it's a linear narrative, structured so as to make the discovery of the diaries a surprise, revelatory moment in the story (as opposed to the possibility of having that the driving force behind the narrative in the first place); as it is, the diary entries add, with Dench's voice-over, standard psychological insight on Barbara, but little more.
Dench is superb as the insecure, unsettled and unsettling veteran teacher; Blanchett is solid but ultimately underused as the novice she befriends. If this film wants to be a psychologically-driven character study (of Dench's Barbara), the flashbacks to Sheba's sex scenes with the young pupil come off as gimmicky... tellingly and tediously, the promotional campaign for the film goes down the "seductive, sexy thriller" route. Not enough is made of her character or her predicament, though, to make her 'half' of the narrative credible; the reason behind her affair with the young boy she teaches seems to be down to an oppressive mother (yawn) and an old(er) husband with a Down Syndrome son (contrived). As the husband, Bill Nighy's excellent if underused.
It's easy to see why this might have appealed as an adaptation - I've not read the novel, but as a story about note-taking and keeping secrets to oneself via diary form, it seems promising and rich. Ultimately, the would-be richness doesn't really translate as well as it could.
Perhaps if it had started at the end, with Sheba discovering Barbara's diaries, it might have been a fascinating and complex unravelling of secrets, voiced retroactively by the reader with the writer in mind. But it's a linear narrative, structured so as to make the discovery of the diaries a surprise, revelatory moment in the story (as opposed to the possibility of having that the driving force behind the narrative in the first place); as it is, the diary entries add, with Dench's voice-over, standard psychological insight on Barbara, but little more.
Dench is superb as the insecure, unsettled and unsettling veteran teacher; Blanchett is solid but ultimately underused as the novice she befriends. If this film wants to be a psychologically-driven character study (of Dench's Barbara), the flashbacks to Sheba's sex scenes with the young pupil come off as gimmicky... tellingly and tediously, the promotional campaign for the film goes down the "seductive, sexy thriller" route. Not enough is made of her character or her predicament, though, to make her 'half' of the narrative credible; the reason behind her affair with the young boy she teaches seems to be down to an oppressive mother (yawn) and an old(er) husband with a Down Syndrome son (contrived). As the husband, Bill Nighy's excellent if underused.