Henry & June
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Movie Reviews of Henry & June
Movie Review: Less Than Truth Can Be Beautiful
Summary: 4 Stars
A beautiful movie, its rich atmosphere almost makes it a period piece of Paris in the early 30s. One must be somewhat familiar with Nin's diaries to pick up on the signifance of some of the details. Much is left understated. Gorgeous soundtrack featuring popular of the time period and classical, including a rare, early version of Josephine Baker's "J'ai Deux Amours" that's much superior to the 50s version. Personally, I feel that the film "Hollywood-izes" the personas of Nin and Miller, making them too amiable. The rough edges of true personality and character that enabled their geniuses are absent in the movie. Brilliance is sometimes unsightly, and, therefore, excluded from the movie. Still, an entertaining, enjoyable, and erotic experience that comes highly recommended.Movie Review: Henry lives on
Summary: 4 Stars
In my youth I read all of Henry Miller's books, finding much that was amazing, boring, sexy. "Henry and June" does about the same. Ward and Thurman as is the wife. No doubt Henry's life may have been less exciting than his imagination, I expected more sex than it showed which was Miller's preoccupation. And he played around a lot more than the movie shows.
But the atmosphere of his life and of Paris were there. An ambiance prevades the story line which explains somewhat his reason for writing gritty life scenes. Worth watching.
Movie Review: Better than I expected.
Summary: 4 Stars
Interesting film. You want to see it from start to finish. Worth watching.Movie Review: Promises the moon, delivers an eclipse.
Summary: 3 Stars
Henry and June (Phillip Kaufman, 1990)
It seems I start every review of an NC-17 movie with great gusting sighs of frustration about how the NC-17 rating promises so much, and somehow fails to deliver every time. NC-17 should be a code for "literate porn", but in reality, it usually has more to do with a filmmaker refusing to cut three buttock thrusts (which David Lynch did to score an R for Wild at Heart) or one almost subliminal and entirely unerotic scene (which Darren Aronofsky refused to cut from Requiem for a Dream, preferring to release the film in all its NC-17 glory). Henry and June fits right in with the rest of them; it's exceptionally literate, but it's hardly porn. For the record, according to IMDB's trivia section, "The 2 to 3 second shot of Anais looking at an explicit illustrated postcard involving a Japanese woman and a squid was the cause of the NC-17 rating." Oh, the humanity. (Or the squidianity, I guess. It was nice to discover that tentacle porn did not originate with hentai!)
Loosely adapted from the diaries of Anais Nin, Henry and June tells the story (from Nin's POV, obviously) of the love triangle of Nin (the almost painfully beautiful Maria de Medeiros, recently of The Saddest Music in the World), Henry Miller (Fred Ward, whose career has encompassed everything from the sublime [Escape from Alcatraz] to the ridiculous [the Tremors movies]), and Miller's lovely, deeply self-destructive wife June (Uma Thurman, who needs no introduction). There's a lot of casual, if secretive, sex, and a great deal of sighing and hand-wringing, and Henry Miller attempting to write Tropic of Cancer, which Anais and her husband Hugo (Richard E. Grant, recently of Filth and Wisdom) grow to love, while June grows to despise it-- though whether Miller is truly distorting her, or whether she hates seeing so much of her true self on the paper we never find out (and is, in many ways, the movie's most absorbing question).
It's not a bad film by any means-- I don't think Kaufman, who has made surprisingly few films over the course of his long and distinguished career, is capable of making a bad film-- but it could certainly have been a better one. The movie's two-hour-plus running time could have been cut by at least half an hour without losing anything of substance (nor of titillation). There's a difference, when one is pacing, between "leisurely" and "pedestrian"; Bela Tarr, for example, makes agonizingly slow movies, but they're great. Henry and June is just plain slow. But within that slowness are stunning performances by just about everyone involved, including small roles from Kevin Spacey, early in his career, Gary Oldman, and Jean-Louis Bunuel (the son of the great director). I watched it in close proximity to Zalman King's painful Delta of Venus, and it's impossible not to compare the two; there's no way Henry and June doesn't come out on top. (Even the pacing is better; Delta of Venus is even more pedestrian.) Still, I can't stop thinking it would've been better if it had been consciously trying to catch the viewer's interest with something other than sex; all these great characters, and we never really get to spend enough quality time with them to really click. ** ½
Movie Review: Ok for the first viewing
Summary: 3 Stars
I was highly disappointed with this movie. The first time I watched it, I'll admit, I did enjoy it. But upon viewing it again and again, it came to my attention how wrong things were portrayed, how facts were turned around or even left out, most likely to make the story more interesting for us 'viewers'. Uma Thurman as June was a horrible call. She looks nothing like June, and she left a very bad taste and cold feeling in me watching her in this. Fred Ward, however, as Henry Miller, was as near, physically, one can get to Miller and Maria de Medeiros was a perfect Anais Nin, physically and personality wise.
I would recommend viewing this if you don't care about details and want an introduction to the life of Henry Miller or Anais Nin, but anything more than that, I'm afraid, it fails.