Ethan Frome
|
Our Price: $24.74 Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Buy Used: from $4.60 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of Ethan Frome
Movie Review: Very Poor Rendering of My All-Time Favorite Book
Summary: 2 Stars
CAUTION: SPOILER ALERT!
Ethan Frome is the most poignant, beautiful, tragic story I've ever read, and is by far Edith Wharton's best work. Yet somehow, despite the fact that Liam Neeson plays the title role and does very well, the filmmakers managed to do a poor job conveying this story.
The decision to replace the book's level-headed, sympathetic introducer of the story with a whiny-voiced, invasive preacher was ridiculous. Patricia Arquette's rendition of Mattie Silver(my favorite female character of all time!!) was completely wrong, although she did have a few good moments. Arquette didn't have the dark hair or the luminous beauty of Mattie, and her acting did almost no justice whatsoever to Mattie's simple but profound character. The nervous laughing in particular drove me crazy. Mattie needs to be portrayed by someone who can fully express her personality -- so warm, intelligent, and vibrant against the wintry cold setting and Ethan's equally frigid wife, Zeena. Ethan's character also needed further exploring through better dialogue and visual story-telling.
Joan Allen was pitch perfect as Zeena, Ethan's abominable hypochondriac wife. If they ever do another film version of this story, I'd want to bring her back. But again, they needed to play up Zeena's manipulative, vindictive, withholding, and silently watchful side even more than they did in order to increase the tension in the household as Ethan and Mattie become increasingly inseparable.
There are two things that I take the most serious issue with in this film. One -- Mattie and Ethan do NOT have sex in the book. At any time. They kiss, in one of the most sensual moments in all of literature, but they do not have sex, Wharton makes it quite clear. Which is why their story is so pure, so poignant, so frustrated, and so desperate. And in this film, they do sleep together, twice. One of those scenes is an appropriately sensual, tense moment, and the other is very sad and desperate but also very... weird and somewhat disturbing. But my point is that changing a crucial factor of the plotline and character development works against the film -- if they were looking for greater intensity, they actually undercut it. Ethan and Mattie sleeping together, especially with so little on-screen development of their romance, makes their love story look more like a lust story and takes away the gorgeous tension of the book.
Which brings me to number two -- the build-up to the lovers' attempted suicide is the most emotionally intense literature I have ever read. The film needs to make it clear that Ethan and Mattie are blocked at every turn by grinding poverty and social boundaries from being able to escape together. A screen adaptation of this book needs to make their love so palpable, so fathomless, that the audience completely understands that they have no alternative BUT suicide if they want to stay together. And then that scene needs to be tremendous.
There were other things that needed to be made perfectly clear, as well -- especially the state of Mattie's mental and physical condition at the end of the story. This film version doesn't make it clear that she is made a quadraplegic with a completely changed personality through the head trauma she experienced in the accident. That is the most horrible sorrow of the entire book, and it needs to be emphasized in order to show the terribleness of Ethan's suffering.
Finally, this book reads like the most gorgeous cinema you could ever encounter -- and a film version ABSOLUTELY MUST be visually stunning, drawn-out, and poignant with the most sumptuous direction, cast, cinematography, color palette, and music that can be found. And this version just didn't cut it, I'm very sorry to say.
Movie Review: It was a good book
Summary: 2 Stars
Ethan Fromme is a great romance book, however as books to movies go, this is one of the worst. Most of the facts were there, but there were added details, and a few missing things which just destroyed the message portrayed in the book.In the book, Ethan's crippled condition is only barely highlited, yet in the movie, it is dragged out to almost hillarious proportions. This reduces the novels intended effect on viewers of the movie, as the fact that it is supposed to seem almost a punishment on Ethan is lost almost completely. Zeena, the lifeless doll which we see with a certain sense of dread at her introduction in the novel, is a beautiful young woman when she appears in the movie, with only a little less charm later on, when, in the events of the novel, she is supposed to seem almost like death itself. Zeena in the movie is constantly portrayed as being not as bad as we are led to see in the book, therefore making us care for her and almost wonder why Ethan would want to have an affair when he has such a 'good' wife. Also, the character of Mattie, an innocent, vivacious character in the novel, is portrayed as a flirtatious... and almost instigates the affair more than Ethan. In the novel, Ethan is the one who truely begins everything, secretly longing for her, but never able to express his feelings to her until he fears she will be gone.
All these changes destroy the tone with which the author of the book adressed Ethan, and ruined the message that we were supposed to get out of her work. Instead of feeling for the characters of Ethan and Mattie as the evil Zeena destroys Ethan, we feel a sense of disgust at Mattie and Ethan's affair. While the movie was true to the book in many ways, it was the ways in which it wasn't that make this movie sub-par, and almost disgraceful to the book.
Movie Review: Jack Warner Was Right.....
Summary: 2 Stars
During her Warner years, Bette Davis constantly lobbied the studio to let her play Mattie in a film of ETHAN FROME. Jack Warner was sure no one would care to see such hopeless material filmed, no matter how starry or surefooted the treatment. On the basis of this plodding version, I have to agree with Jack. American Playhouse's theatrical wing has managed to turn the book every high school student hated (Wharton's novella has done more to kill the idea of reading for pleasure for generations of students than any literary work since SILAS MARNER was thrust upon an unwary world) into a picture that's more grim duty than pleasure. A game cast struggles to animate Richard Nelson's bare-bones screenplay, but they're soon defeated, lost in an endless progression of drab scenes that sit there, inert, rather than smouldering with emotional subtext, as presumably was intended. Neeson and Allen come off rather better than Patricia Arquette; very attractive in other films, she seems slackjawed and dimwitted here. A pleasure to see Katharine Houghton, aging well and in there pitching in a thankless role. Think of this version as taking about an hour longer than reading the Cliff Notes, and feeling only half as enjoyable, and you'll be in the right ballpark.Movie Review: It could've been a great movie...
Summary: 2 Stars
...If only Patricia Arquette weren't in it. I never had anything against her before I saw this movie, but boy, does she know how to ruin a good movie. Liam Neeson was brilliant, and Joan Allen's performance was good, too, but Arquette's "acting" (I use the term loosely) was so overblown, so limp and clumsy and unbelievable, that it ruined the whole film for me; I've seen sixth-graders with better acting skills than I saw out of Arquette in this movie. It's a shame, because the scenes without her in them are brilliant, and the other actors turn in commendable performances. If only they'd hired a more competent actress or paid for some lessons for Arquette.Movie Review: You can never turn the work of Edith Wharton into a movie!!
Summary: 1 Stars
I knew this would happen, knowing how many books get turned into bad movies, especially the work of literary giants like Edith Wharton. If you are NOT a reader of fine literature, you may like this movie - a simple romance, like millions of other movies.
But if you have read Wharton's classic novelette, one of the finest pieces of work, you would dislike this movie immensely. Wharton was born in 1862 and died in 1937 at 75 years. She won a Pulitzer Prize in Literature for The Age of Innocence.
With a unique writing style, one that absorbs the reader into deeper thoughts and greater description, fine prose, and without rushing through the plot.
The 1993 film's cinematography was beautiful, characters were nothing memorable and the focus of the story was missing, the intense relationships, the gravity of suspense, the extent of the deeper personalities we so became used to. Liam Neeson does a decent job at playing Ethan, but we really miss what and who Zeena, Mattie and Ethan are all about. The book is not about sex or lurid romance, it is subtle. That is what needs to come across in a Wharton based movie, and Hollywood doesn't do that, and you can't expect them to. And reading the book, one can instantly recognizes "movie scenes", predicting which scenes Hollywood will use. Ethan Frome is not meant for the big screen!
If you are willing to delve into dramatic plays, try Best American Plays: 1918-1958 Supplementary Volume Complete for a captivating, engaging, play based on the book Ethan Frome. The play was first staged in 1936 and the adaption of of the book is done by a father and son team, Owen Davis and Donald Davis. This play is wonderful!!!
But, try the book Ethan Frome and see why this should never had been turned into a Hollywood movie. .....Rizzo