A Little Sound and Fury

I think you have to be in very tolerant mood to enjoy this film. I've never seen a Richard Gere's performance that I liked, but it was Monday, which I've designated as 'alternative movie' night' when I go and see films on my own without trading them off against the films my partner wants to see and I don’t. It’s a ‘Mamma Mia’ and ‘Sex and the City’ night. Besides, it's a long times since I watched a romantic film, apart from costume dramas.


As with ‘Mamma Mia’, there’s a lot of scenery. The opening shot is a remote, idyllic hotel off the North Carolina coast, on stilts at the water's edge. It's tall and irregular with steep roofs, like a castle, with balconies and long blue shutters, a bit Disneyfied but within the bounds of belief. Just. The heroine, an attractive blonde thirty-something (Diane Lane) has promised to look after the hotel for the weekend whilst her friend, a young black woman who inherited the property from her grandmother, goes to sell her own artwork to some dealers. Hmm.

The main character attended art school and then carved driftwood, until she became a mom. She made boxes for people to keep their most precious possessions in. I’m still giving it a chance, although why carving driftwood is incompatible with looking after a ten year old and a teenager who are out at school all day I don’t know. I'm suspicious about that ‘precious things’ motif, too. The boxes have a role in the story later. The heroine has apparently been waiting for someone like Richard Gere to come along and remind her to be a 'person'. Her husband went off with her best friend and he turned up just before she left for the weekend to say he wants to come back home. You feel if it weren’t for the hotel promise she'd let him, especially with the mildly punk-style teenage daughter guilt-tripping her. There’s also a son with asthma. Cue for a soul-searching moment later. You think, ‘No, don’t tell me so clearly in advance.’

The only guest is Richard Gere , a troubled surgeon with his own ‘inner demons’ as the blurbs say. The film conveys this by showing him running along the beach in the early morning. He doesn’t say much, and you wonder if a lack of communiction is the reason his own marriage failed.

A hurricane blows up but by the time it does the pair exchanged a few confidences and the inevitable happens. The hurricane dies down as quickly as it appeared. Fortunately the bed scenes are fairly discreet and the main one shows them talking in the aftermath, well covered. There are some enjoyable interludes with lovable locals at the grocery store and a barn dance where the camera lingers on the elderly fiddle players to break up the boring one-on-ones between the main players. The script isn't exactly sizzling The only good acting acting comes from an old man who accuses Richard Gere of causing his wife's death, one of two scenes with any real emotional impact. He appears in both. It seems an operation went wrong for no real reason.Gere, is about to chase his doctor son doing volunteer work in Ecuador, disgusted by his father’s apparent unconcern.

It's after he goes and the letters arrive that it all begins to slow down, with the heroine just moping about and then it all just goes from bad to worse, with picture postcard flashbacks to Ecuador and shameless sentimentality. The teen-agers makes a sudden change of personality to support the mom and there’s a really mawkish ending featuring a troupe of wild horses on the beach. It’s another of the incidents given such blatant advance warning you laugh when it happens. The heroine’s on her knees in the sand mouthing ‘Oh, My God!’ over and over and I’m left blaiming the film for making me feel so cynical. It’s such a shame that it all goes downhill , especially as apparently it was based on a novel, by one Nicholas Spark. There couldn’t have been much dialogue in it. I couldn’t help thinking Ralph and Keira would have made much more of this credulity-stretching effort. At least with 'The Duchess' there was the excitement of a wig catching fire.

This site has an interview with the stars that is so anodyne it makes you cringe. At least it’s short:

http://www.capitalradio.co.uk/music-showbiz/film/out-now/nights-rodante/