A Doll's House
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Movie Reviews of A Doll's House
Movie Review: Thought-provoking
Summary: 4 Stars
This film is disturbing in a good way, in that it encourages us to look at our own lifestyles, relationships, and assumptions. The movie has the feel of a play.Movie Review: Another misinterpretation
Summary: 3 Stars
When I was in college I had a one-on-one course with a professional actor, Bernie Barrow, who was best known to the television audience as the star of a soap opera called Ryan's Hope. He was Ryan. It is funny to think of him as a soap opera actor. He was actually a lot more Shakespearian.
One of the things we concentrated on was A Doll's House. We took it apart. We worked on the blocking, the intention of each line, even the unstated intention behind each line.
Bernie seemed to be a big fan of Bernard Shaw. And Shaw had a unique interpretation of A Doll's House. Shaw thought of this play as a pure comedy about a pair of endearing and funny people, Nora and her stupid husband. I'm paraphrasing. Perhaps Shaw wouldn't describe it this way. But it is what I took out of Shaw's comments.
In any event, and Bernard Shaw aside, though he was my main influence here, I believe that A Doll's House was written as a comedy more than a social statement. Ibsen himself describes it as a comedy. Sure, there are social lessons to be learned. But the play was meant to be funny, as far as I can tell.
That leaves Claire Bloom out of the lead role. It also leaves Jane Fonda out of it. They are both far too serious, not doll-like enough.
We are "supposed to" see Nora Helmer as cute, doll-like, immature, funny. There is a reason that her father and her husband treat her the way they do. She invites it. She is a bit of a ditz. She is not simply their creation. You don't take a daughter like Claire Bloom or Jane Fonda and treat her like a ditz. This "doll" is childlike. You love her, you treasure her, you respect her, but you enjoy her for the childlike girl she is.
Do you remember the tv series Laugh In? Do you remember Goldie Hawn's role, the tattooed dancing girl with the adorable and silly smile? There's your Nora Helmer. Goldie Hawn in Laugh In. There's your doll.
As for her husband, you need a male version of a ditz, a bit of a pompous fool, someone like the father in Mary Poppins.
I would absolutely love to see a version of this play using my interpretation.
Movie Review: Excellent satire played straight
Summary: 3 Stars
Director Patrick Garland's interpretation of Ibsen's famous social satire 'A Doll's House,' while competent and loyal to the source material, lacks effect, I think, mainly for its needlessly dry, Victorian take on a vital, perpetually contemporary theme: the systematic marginalization of those who resist the roles assigned to them by the prevailing mores and conventions of society. Missing in this production is the spirit of Ibsen's wit, which I believe would help us chuckle sympathetically, rather than scowl from a distance, at the vain hopes, hypocrisies and excesses of the playwright's bourgeois set staged in the first two acts, thus providing a much broader context, dramatically speaking, for fleshing out the universal relevancy of the poignant but potentially period-bound subject matter revealed in the third. Ironically, the film's earnest attempts to portray the play's events and characters so literally, so BBCeriously, ultimately work against it and by the final scene the whole exercise seems to have been reduced to a rather dull and dour polemic proposing feminism as an imperfect, last-ditch remedy for 19th century social injustice. Hopkins turns in a skillful but too-restrained performance as the phallocentrically rigid and self-admiring banker/husband Torvald, and Bloom (probably herself over-mature for the role) comes across as too wise and conniving to be believed as the flighty doll-wife Nora. All that having been said, though, the movie is well done. The sets are rich and befitting the era; the actors, however possibly miscast the principals (I'd like to have seen Albert Finney and Susannah York take a crack at the time), are all technically first-rate; and the story, even told as it is, without a hint of caricature, is engaging and paced efficiently by the director.Movie Review: Horrible
Summary: 3 Stars
This play is my favorite piece of literature, and I was so excited to hear there was a movie version of this out there. The acting is great; all the characters do an awesome job with their parts, but this adaptation doesn't follow the original script. The part when Torvald finds about Nora's loan, I thought, was weak in building the drama. In the play itself, Linde and Kreogstad don't have any real interaction until the end of the play when they go off with each other. I prefer "wonderful thing" instead of "wonderful miracle."
Then the final scene with Hopkins in the room by himself saying, "The most wondserful miracle of all?" I thought it really lacked any true emotion. The was little extra in this DVD, and watching the introduction was really critical to understanding the buildup of suspense. If you don't watch that, the movie will be really boring. Ibsen's message is powerful and still holds true today, but I think the play is a far better choice than the movie.
Movie Review: Warning! Don't watch this with your wife
Summary: 3 Stars
A young Anthony Hopkins and Clare Bloom give wonderful performances in this stirring paean to woman's lib or something quite near the edge of domestic apocalypse.