The Way We Live Now
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Movie Reviews of The Way We Live Now
Movie Review: Wonderful production
Summary: 3 Stars
This was wonderful - the sense of menace and waste barreling along against a compelling love story...Sir Felix is awful in many ways but I got a bang out his character; same for many of the other actors, especially Marie and her earned hatred for her father. Only objection was the truly awful southern accent of one character - yikes!Movie Review: A Differant Suchet
Summary: 2 Stars
David Suchet is a fine actor. I did not find the script
for this story to be fine. Average. I would probably not
tell anyone it's great enough to buy.
Movie Review: No
Summary: 2 Stars
I thought this would be really good but it is not for my taste I really like 1800 movies and this is not up to it.Movie Review: Terrible. Does not do justice to a brilliant book (spoilers)
Summary: 1 Stars
Let me start by saying that I am not a purist. I can live with changes to a story, but only if those changes don't change it materially or take away from its spirit. The changes made by Andrew Davies to The Way We Live Now upset me greatly -- he most definitely did change the story to the point where its essence was no longer recognizable.
The Way We Live Now is considered by many (yours truly included) to be Trollope's masterpiece. Trollope's Melmotte is a thoroughly corrupt man, but Davies glosses over this corruption to focus on Sir Felix Carbury's sex life. People will say that, with only a few hours to work with, certain choices have to be made. I fully understand that. But Davies' choices baffle me. Why not show the depth of Melmotte's corruption and greed? Why not show what a true and complete disaster the dinner party for the Chinese emperor was? The dinner party was, in my opinion, the turning point of the book. It's where Melmotte's downfall goes from being mere rumor to being public knowledge. This is key to the story, and I'd rather have seen that on my screen than Sir Felix rolling in the hay with Ruby. It has nothing to do with prudishness. It does, however, have everything to do with the fact that Trollope wrote about white collar crime and corruption, and this film shows us very little about what Trollope wrote.
But, as per usual, Davies has other things on his mind. His Sir Felix Carbury is a misunderstood, lovable cad. Trollope's is a dissolute, depraved man whose selfishness and self-absorption almost ruin his mother and sister. In the book, we see that Sir Felix tries to rape Ruby, but Davies glosses over this by putting it way off into the background. Davies would rather focus on Marie Melmotte's attempts to grope Sir Felix at her father's dinner table than on the original story.
The cast is outstanding, except for Miranda Otto (she and her truly embarrassing attempt at an American accent are woefully miscast as Mrs. Hurtle -- I hope she's gotten better since this) and Cillian Murphy (he looks delicate enough to be a girl, not an engineer trying to strike it rich in the American southwest), as are the production values. It's just such a shame that the story is butchered almost beyond recognition. Trollope's ending is not ambiguous. Sir Felix pays for his sins. Davies' ending is nothing if not ambiguous. Sir Felix is still out there, having fun.
Trollope's been dramatized better than this. The Pallisers is, in my mind, the best series the Beeb has ever made. They should be embarrassed by this one.
Movie Review: The Way They Never Lived
Summary: 1 Stars
The acting is great but if you love the English classic novel, you will be sorely disappointed. This BBC production is very far from accurately portraying life as it was then. First, those wonderful and witty Jane Austen novels were made into a sort of high-budget Mills and Boon and now humorous Anthony Trollope is given a sort of Tolstoy treatment, beginning with the overblown theme music better suited to War and Peace. Andrew Davies has gotten too cocky with his numerous adaptations, increasingly indulging himself in a kind of reverse bowdlerization. Almost every one that was romantically involved in the book is sleeping together in the DVD. We even get an attempted rape scene, emphatically not in the book. At this rate we need an annotated Trollope to inform us that "lover" in the Victorian era did not mean sexually intimate. There is an attempt to make several of the female characters more PC by putting speeches into their mouths about women having to look out for themselves. I find this patronizing in the extreme. Why not portray things as they truly were then and let us draw our own conclusions about that culture? ...Then the same women turn around and say you should take love where you can get it and not expect your man to be too good. This convoluted reasoning may sound right in a 21st century soap opera but does not accurately reflect the Victorian era. In addition, the DVD ends differently from the book re the fate of several of the major characters. I own every one of Trollope's 80+ novels and only wish his name wasn't on this at all.
In contrast, The Barchester Chronicles is a complete delight. Oh, for the pre-Andrew Davies days and a screen writer that can see the wonderful, dry, intelligent 19th century humor.The Way We Live NowThe Anthony Trollope Collection (The Barchester Chronicles / He Knew He Was Right / The Way We Live Now)Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now [VHS]