Protective Riding Headwear: Movie Review: 'Winter's Tale'

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Movie Review: 'Winter's Tale'

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Warner Bros. Pictures

Movie Review: 'Winter's Tale'

The Times critic A. O. Scott reviews "Winter's Tale."

Winters Tale, Mark Helprins 1983 best seller, was the Goldfinch of its time: fat and ambitious, with a romantic view of New York City and an unabashed commitment to the kind of old-fashioned narrative abundance that seemed, then as now, to be missing from too much literary fiction. It is a bit surprising that the movie adaptation (written and directed by Akiva Goldsman) has taken so long to arrive, though perhaps less surprising that it should be so clumsy and inert, a lumbering white elephant rather than the flying white horse that is the novels magical mascot.

The horse, which will eventually sprout gauzy digital wings and soar over the Brooklyn Bridge, provides assistance to Peter Lake, an artisanal thief in early-20th-century New York who has untamable hair and the scruffy leprechaun charm of Colin Farrell. Peter also shows up, with a different coif, in 2014 Manhattan, where he finds a box of significant junk in a secret hiding place in Grand Central Terminal and befriends a newspaper reporter played by Jennifer Connelly. But that is much later. First he must evade the clutches of his former boss, Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe), and fall in love with a consumptive, wealthy redhead named Beverly. Downton Abbey fans will recognize her as Jessica Brown Findlay, who played the cruelly killed and widely mourned Lady Sybil.

Colin Farrell is an unwitting conscript in a war between good and evil in Winters Tale, a film directed by Akiva Goldsman. David C. Lee/Warner Bros. Pictures

She is dying in this one, too. That is hardly a spoiler, since her introductory voice-over has a beyond-the-grave quality, and she is lighted (courtesy of the cinematographer, Caleb Deschanel) with the glow of poetic martyrdom. But Mr. Goldsman, making his directing debut, suppresses the morbid and even the merely sad implications of the story in favor of wide-eyed, mystical wonder. There are swooping aerial shots, buckets of orchestral goo (from the composers Hans Zimmer and Rupert Gregson-Williams) and much talk of destiny, miracles and angels.

What if we get to become stars? Ms. Findlay breathlessly wonders, meaning not the kind she is already well on the way to becoming, but rather the gaseous, faraway kind that we glimpse in the night sky.

Of course, we dont get to do that, and it takes more than the literalization of a metaphor to make it fly. A thin line separates the magical from the preposterous, and by insisting so strenuously on its own magic, Winters Tale pitches helplessly into earnest ridiculousness. Its old New York is a lustrous and sparkling place, but one from which the texture of actual life has been almost entirely scrubbed away. Instead of storybook charm, it has the overworked, too-perfect grandiosity of a corporate theme park.

Russell Crowe takes a turn as a demonic boss engaged in an unflagging campaign against love, hope and happiness. Warner Bros. Pictures

The modern city, where much of the second part of the movie takes place, is a slightly more interesting environment, partly because of the way the almost forgotten traces of its previous incarnation lie just under the surface. And Mr. Farrell has a livelier connection in a few scenes with Ms. Connelly than he does in all of his moony-eyed, slack-jawed moments of romantic communion with Ms. Findlay.

The story, meanwhile, jettisons the digressions and subplots that are the pith of the novel (along with Mr. Helprins calorie-rich prose) and settles into a standard movie-fantasy battle between good and evil. Mr. Crowes character is not merely a criminal, but also a demon, and, as such, enlisted in a centuries-long campaign against love, hope and happiness. Peter is an unwitting conscript in that war, the rules of which keep changing. Sometimes a fellow in a hat is an angel; sometimes demons are forbidden from traveling north of the Bronx.

The combat is duller than what you might find in a Percy Jackson film, partly because the movie ostentatiously prefers its murky themes to any kind of action-movie thrills. This is pretension masquerading as good taste, and Winters Tale is so obsessed with announcing how beautiful and wonderful it is that it forgets to be any fun.

Winters Tale is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). A few bad words, a few moments of softly lit, metaphysically significant sex.

Winters Tale

Opens on Friday.

Written and directed by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Mark Helprin; director of photography, Caleb Deschanel; edited by Wayne Wahrman and Tim Squyres; music by Hans Zimmer and Rupert Gregson-Williams; production design by Naomi Shohan; costumes by Michael Kaplan; produced by Mr. Goldsman, Marc Platt, Michael Tadross and Tony Allard; released by Warner Bros. Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.

WITH: Colin Farrell (Peter Lake), Jessica Brown Findlay (Beverly Penn), Jennifer Connelly (Virginia Gamely), William Hurt (Isaac Penn), Eva Marie Saint (Adult Willa), Russell Crowe (Pearly Soames), McKayla Twiggs (Little Willa) and Ripley Sobo (Abby).

A version of this review appears in print on February 14, 2014, on page C8 of the New York edition with the headline: Demons at Work in Snowy Magic of New York.

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Sunday, February 16, 2014

Movie Review: 'Winter's Tale'

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