Felicia's Journey
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Movie Reviews of Felicia's Journey
Movie Review: Atom Egoyan's Psycho
Summary: 4 Stars
a-movie-to-see.com recommendationBrazil wasn't the first Bob Hoskins film I saw, but the third. It was the first film where I could understand a word he was saying. I simply couldn't penetrate his cockney in The Long Good Friday or Mona Lisa.
That doesn't mean I couldn't understand his characters. Hoskins is a forthright screen actor. He can inhabit his compact frame with a ferocious mob boss, a compassionate chauffer, a duct repairman or a foil for Roger Rabbit with imperceptible effort.
Felicia's Journey played the Cannes film festival, there was a buzz about his performance. I liked the idea of him teaming with Atom Egoyan whose tragic The Sweet Hereafter drew a heartwrenching performance from Ian Holm.
Listening to William Trevor's book on tape, I could tell the role of factory caterer/serial killer Joseph Ambrose Hilditch was made for Hoskins.
Mr Hilditch's hands are small, seeming not to belong to the rest of him; deft, delicate fingers that can insert a battery into a watch or tidily truss a chicken, this latter a useful accomplishment, for of all things in the world Mr Hilditch enjoys eating.
Like his predecessors Anthony Perkins (Psycho) and Barry Foster (Frenzy) he seems outwardly affable enough when he's with his coworkers or offering avuncular advice to wayward girls like Felicia (Elaine Cassidy). Atom Egoyan dispenses with the sensationalism of Hitchcock's shower scene and staircase sequences. He credits us with the wherewithal to conjure our own violent images to accompany Hilditch's collection of videotaped victims.
On the other hand, he doesn't rely on a convoluted psychiatrist's explanation to explain to us where Hilditch went wrong. We simply watch him go wrong this time.
Movie Review: The big bad wolf and little red riding hood?
Summary: 4 Stars
The big bad wolf and little red riding hood? Perhaps, but only after both characters have been sat down upon a couch and had their brains analyzed by a shrink. Mr. Hilditch: A lonely, pathetic, deranged older man, forever trapped in the mind of a pre-pubescent boy still under the spell of an oblivious mother completely pre-occupied with a French cooking show she hosts. Felicia: A "deer in the headlights" Irish girl, disowned by her father after getting herself knocked up by Johnny, a British lad who after having slept with her, takes the first bus out of Ireland. Even though Felicia's off to visit the elusive Johnny instead of Grandma, the big bad wolf could care less. As soon as he spots her his taste buds start performing a ritual dance and our little miss mistakes him for a puppy dog. Fortunately, it's not so much the story as the storytelling that makes FELICIA'S JOURNEY so mesmerizing, and both director Egoyan and writer William Trevor are excellent storytellers that have the uncanny ability at finding the macabre in the mundane. Egoyan also has an incredible talent for taking a popular tune and putting into a specific context thus allowing it to work in unison with the images to tell the story with much greater depth. In making this film so effective, Egoyan owes much to the performance of Bob Hoskins who manages to take a character so despicably horrific and infuse him with such a tremendous sense of loneliness and isolation, that we actually feel sorry for him.Movie Review: Bob Hoskins Outstanding in a Fine, Disturbing Movie
Summary: 4 Stars
The Sweet Hereafter is such a first-rate movie that I wanted to take another look at this one, which Egoyan made two years later. It's not in the same league as Hereafter, but it is an excellent, disturbing movie.
Bob Hoskins plays Joseph Hilditch, who runs a big kitchen operation to feed the employees of a factory. At night he cooks elaborate dinners in his own gadget-filled kitchen while watching old video tapes of a cooking show. The star of the show had been his mother, an enveloping presence who completely dominated young Joey. Then he eats his meals alone, listening to Mantovani and other standbys of the Fifties. He also occasionally helps out young women when they are in distress.
Felicia (Elaine Cassidy) has come to his city from Ireland to look for her lover, who left to find a better job and promised to write regularly. He never wrote and she found herself pregnant.
They meet. He takes her in. Through flashbacks and circumstance we learn that Hilditch is a disturbed and violent individual. The movie sets all this up in an uneasy, quiet, almost sympathetic way, and then deals with how these two deal with each other.
This isn't some sort of murder or horror story; Hoskins doesn't jump out of closets. It's about two damaged people in which more damage can happen. I liked it a lot.
The DVD transfer is very good
Movie Review: A chilling movie....
Summary: 4 Stars
Atom Egoyan's Felicia's Journey is the kind of movie that will make you sit and think about the characters. In the surface and in the promotions, this is a serial killer movie. In reality, it is much more than this. Not only does the movie deal with the plottings of a madman played by Bob Hoskins, but it gives us a window into his past which tries to help us understand what went wrong with this man. Yet we could never completely understand a man like this. Opposite Hoskins is a very innocent performance by Elaine Cassidy. She plays a naive young lady, looking for her boyfriend. Here, too, we see the pain in her life. Both Hoskins and Cassidy have a horrible mother and father, respectively. The shame in which they grow up in is very important here.
I was less interested in what was going to happen and what did happen than I was in letting Egoyan work his gift as a director. He manages to take this story into disturbing imagery not because of gore or physicality, but for meeting such scarred people, and (in Hoskin's case) their victims in such a visually provacative way.
Movie Review: Fine Egoyan!
Summary: 4 Stars
Felicia's Journey is a film that I admire more than like. Base on the novel by William Trevor, Egoyan's adaptation is a dreary, very slow paced, and haunting tale of a young pregnant girl searching for her missing boyfriend, and unwittingly getting involved with a serial killer. The story is told with no blood or gore, but manages to be unsettling because of the solid performances by the entire cast. Bob Hoskins' Hilditch is in many ways like Norman Bates in PSYCHO, an innocent driven so crazy by an unstable mother (an eerie Arshinee Khanjian, Egoyan's wife) that he has grown up with a need to kill. This is the most fascinating aspect of the story and I would have liked it seen explored some more. Felicia's Journey is definitely not for all tastes. Its pacing is deliberately slow and might not work for some, but it is a good film, if not a great one, full of Egoyan's trademark style. It is rich in imagery and manages to tell its story effectively. It slowly creeps under the skin and lingers in the mind. Not Egoyan's masterpiece, but close.