Starring: Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe
A thief from the streets of Brooklyn in the early twentieth-century, Peter Lake (Farrell) is in the midst of stealing from an upscale house when he crosses paths with Beverley Penn (Findlay) and it's love at first sight. But Beverley is dying of consumption, and Peter is on the run from his dangerous boss, Pearley Soames (Crowe). Nearly a hundred years later, an unaged but amnesiac Peter pieces together parts of his past life.
From the writer of the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind (2001) (and bringing along its stars Jennifer Connelly and Russell Crowe both in line for the upcoming film Noah as well), A New York Winter's Tale is an adaptation of an 800 page romantic fantasy novel and in translation, it gets dealt a pretty severe battering.
The film's approach to romance is one of extreme melodrama, with everything blown up to grand gestures even when Farrell and Findlay don't really have much chemistry on screen. As far as the composite parts go, both do fair jobs but Farrell's Irish accent is out of place with the character even if he did grow up under the wing of Russell Crowe, here playing up being more Irish than if he were jigging through a field of shamrocks and being ridden by Guinness-guzzling leprechauns. Meanwhile, Findlay is supposedly dying of consumption (itself an incredible cliche) whilst actually looking very healthy and even thrashing out Bach periodically on the piano. Of the cast the best performance goes to Will Smith in an uncharacteristically dark role, but he doesn't look like he's very enthusiastic with the part.
The fantasy element may show signs of promise, but it's quickly blown out of the water. Given that the plot was probably ruthlessly condensed for the screen, plot points that may have worked with more detail just seem inexplicable and bizarre (Farrell rides a flying horse, that's mentioned to also be a dog...nothing comes of that last bit of information). The plot seems only partially thought through and was probably going to be set in a slightly different period given the oddities of ageing (one character in the 2014-set part of the plot is supposed to be at least 105 and yet she's an editor of a major paper and seems remarkably active mentally and physically, befitting a woman decades younger) and throughout we're also told little gems of treacle like how the stars are related to the wings of angels.
I would genuinely like to believe that a novel as clearly ambitious at the source material could one day be adapted again into something grander, and perhaps another one or two rewrites would've corrected this but here something went wrong and disappeared into a hole of too little sense and too much sentiment,
Next time, Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton are two vampiric lovers who reunite from disparate climes in Jim Jarmusch's latest film, Only Lovers Left Alive.
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