| RATING: | 80% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Superior British soap-opera and totally engrossing in its tale of ordinary people making the best of what their culture throws at them. It plays in three distinct sections and takes you to hell and back.
There is no rush to develop the characters in a leisurely-paced movie that lets the acting breathe naturally. This is a rare drama whose exposition is actually seen as an essential part of it rather than something to sit through before the action really begins. How each character responds to the same event is much more important than the event itself because of the personality so astutely revealed thereby.
Moreover, the landscapes against which the various personalities interact become characters in their own right since the industrial, mountainous & jungle landscapes are vividly contrasted and compared in the same way. This is proper visual storytelling of a high order; allowing for a deep understanding of the people portrayed and, therefore, a profound emotional engagement with them. The friendship between the three central characters, as well as their shared association with the men from their small hometown, is truthful and realistic in a way that also makes this deeply anti-macho.
Yet, despite the epic over-length of the movie, there is also dramatic concision when necessary (to avoid an over-indulgence in gore) in brilliantly using Russian roulette as a metaphor worthy of a Shakespeare for war’s often traumatically-brutalising affects. However, some of the plotting is a little odd as dramatic necessity trumps credibility and it, unfortnately, has a determinedly one-sided point of view.
The director (Michael CIMINO) is essentially a mediocre filmmaker who happened to get lucky with this one film and its topflight cast. He managed to fashion a superb family melodrama about the relationship between the familial and the wider society. A film that is especially poignant about the breakdown in the relationship between the two that actually threatens these particular families (& the family as such) as happened in the US during the Vietnam War.
Despite its suffering, the family is healed by the very act of staying together and by reaffirming the positive relationship to the wider national family. Yet the movie is subtle enough to ask its audience the most relevant question of all: What price patriotism? And its answer is that it is clearly a high one.
Robert DE NIRO and Meryl STREEP are particularly excellent as shy lovers whose slow-paced courtship perfectly complements the film’s mood, tone & pacing. Together with their beautifully crafted love theme, you will find few tear-jerking and character driven British films better than this.
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