Carrington
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List Price: $19.98
Features
• Closed-captioned
• Color
• HiFi Sound
• NTSC
In Theaters : 10 November, 1995
Video Release : 11 February, 1997 |
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Carrington Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Adrift in a French farce without a sense of humor
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This film, "Carrington," displays just about all the virtues and faults of the Merchant-Ivory/Masterpiece Theater genre. It is very earnest, very well acted and very pretty to look upon. It's sometimes quite intelligent. It is also very self-satisfied, very slow and very lacking in humor. It's sometimes very dull, too.
The virtues are just that, virtues. Cumulatively, they build up a lot of credit for this film. The faults, depending on a viewer's personal values, may be regarded as lying somewhere on a scale ranging from irrelevant to fatal. I lean to one extreme. My wife leans to the other.
It might even be argued that the self-satisfaction, the humorlessness are neither more nor less than accurate depictions of Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey and that whole self-absorbed, sexually-perplexed, navel-gazing crowd of twits at Bloomsbury.
I prefer to regard the director-writer, the actors and the whole production as hopelessly gullible in taking their real life protagonists at their own value. The Woolfs, the Bells, Strachey and Carrington herself would, if given half a chance, express themselves as characters in a drama of high-flown aspirations and tragic consequences. I, on the other hand, tend to view them as puppets in a French farce, albeit one written by D. H. Lawrence.
This film, its settings, its characters and its mind-set bear only the most tenuous connection with the real, tangible world. As W.S. Gilbert might have put it, the film and all those in it yearn for Elysian fields, but ignore the fact that they "can't get'em and would only let'em out on building leases" if they had'em. "Carrington" would be well served by the presence of just such a character as Fitzgerald threw in to add a spice of reality to the slow-simmering gumbo of Gatsby and Daisy and Tom: Nick, the narrator, doubter and conscience--a pallid character, yes, but still a whiff of the tax paying, traffic light-bound workaday world.
As a film, "Carrington" is easy on the eye. Its story is interesting enough, although I can't imagine being drawn back to watch it of my own volition again at any time in the foreseeable future. But even as I question the worth of making the film, I can't deny the high level of skill lavished on it.
I think "Carrington" is a film worth seeing--once. That's good enough for four stars as far as I'm concerned. |
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