(I found this nearly finished in my drafts and decided it was worth posting after all. I've kept the original date.)
She turned me into a newt!
A newt?
Well, I got better.
This weekend The Beau and I watched the 1996 film of The Crucible, since we had both somehow skipped it in our high school education. I have to admit, I don't think we really missed out. All I learned from the experience is that
a) Puritanism is one messed up religion.
b) Teenage girls can be cruel, vindictive, and prone to hysterics.
c) Paul Scofield is a great actor with awesome diction.
d) Movies with creepy music and lots of people screaming freak me out.
All of which I managed to learn in high school anyway so there.
Thanks to my graduate studies I can also attest that the chairs and ceramic jugs were reasonably accurate.
Luckily, some professional reviews confirmed my suspicions that this film has too much yelling, not enough nuance.
Roger Ebert says: The story has all the right moves and all the correct attitudes, but there is something lacking at its core; I think it needs less frenzy and more human nature... The characters I believed in most were Elizabeth Proctor, the Rev. Hale, and Judge Danforth. As written and acted, they seem like plausible people doing their best in an impossible situation. Too many of the others seem like fictional puppets. The village girls in general (and Abigail Williams in particular) don't even seem to belong to the 17th century; as they scurry hysterically around the village, they act like they've seen too many movies.
Another review agrees: The actors, with four exceptions, spend their time shrieking and spitting at the camera. Ryder comes off the worst: she looks the part, but whenever she opens her mouth, it's over.
I seriously had trouble falling asleep after what was supposed to be a fun movie night. Maybe I shouldn't have gotten so emotionally involved, with Salem Witch Trials joining the Donner Party on my list of "tragedies of American history that make me cry."
No comments:
Post a Comment