Director: Robert Altman
Cast:Eileen Atkins, Bob Balaban, Alan Bates, Charles Dance
Have I Seen it Before: I have the strongest memory of going to see it during its theatrical run. Based on its date of release, I can only be about ten percent sure about whom I was with when I saw it, and memories of the film itself are even thinner. I remember being pretty thoroughly bored with the film at the time, and I’m pretty sure my date and I got pretty bored with each other shortly thereafter.
I only picked up a used copy of the DVD after thoroughly. enjoying Downton Abbey and remembering the author of that show, Julian Fellowes, wrote the screenplay here.
Several years later, I have yet to even finish that series* (or its later follow-up film), and so the DVD lingered in my pile of to-be-opened discs.
Did I Like It: It’s only after watching the film in its entirety now that I come to the conclusion that I may have walked out of the film, because I remembered hardly any of it. It’s entirely possible I saw some other film way back when.
Oh, well. I’m all for a film eschewing a traditional plot, especially if there is a cleverness in its construction, or an undeniable wit in the dialogue. What always bums me out is when a film tries to rise above those constraints, offer up a depiction of life as it might very well have been at the time, but then tries to force a plot into the proceedings. While it’s clear that Downton Abbey owes a lot to this movie, that series always had a story that moved things a long. This film is about nothing for fully half of its runtime, and then takes a sudden turn into a murder mystery that... ultimately doesn’t matter?
It actually makes me want to skip any of those parts of Downton that missed. Good job, movie.
*I’m not even entirely sure why I stopped watching Abbey. It might have been similar to why I stopped watching Friday Night Lights, in that I always wanted to have new episodes to watch, or it may have been because there’s so much to watch, only so many hours inthe waking day, and the strange desire to re-watch other things.