THE WINTER GUEST
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 1998 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): * 1/2
THE WINTER GUEST, first-time director Alan Rickman's ode to bleakness, tells four overlapping stories which occur in a Scottish seaside town on the coldest day in living memory. So bitter is the weather that even the surface of the sea freezes solid.
One story concerns the trivialities of two elderly women, played by Sheila Reid as Lily and Sandra Voe as Chloe, traveling to a funeral. Another explores the uncertain romantic feelings of two teenagers, played by Gary Hollywood and Arlene Cockburn. A third has two boys, played by Douglas Murphy and Sean Biggerstaff, frolicking at the beach. The centerpiece of the picture is the verbal pas de deux between Emma Thompson and her real-life mother Phyllida Law, playing fictional mother and daughter Frances and Elspeth.
Rickman, who played opposite Thompson in SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, brings a slow and delicate touch to his directing. With more engaging material, this approach could have worked, but the remote and uninvolving script makes less for a movie than a cinematic tone poem. Rickman and Sharman MacDonald created the script from MacDonald's play, which was hopefully better than the motion picture adaptation.
The accomplished actress Emma Thompson, in one of her lesser performances, plays a depressed woman whose husband died a few years ago and who resents her pushy mother. ("This is my own body," she informs her mother who complains about the way her hair looks. "I can do what I like. I can gain weight if I like, and I can cut my own hair.")
Phyllida Law plays a constant complainer of a mother. "I should of had a boy," she says. "Girls are hard to rear and hard of heart." Both Law and Thompson appear to be following directions carefully in their acting, but neither character is well developed or worth caring about.
Michael Kamen's hauntingly sad piano music and Seamus McGarvey's chillingly handsome cinematography fill the screen with beauty, but the movie itself is as cold as the frozen climate. The movie is so soporific that one begins to hope against hope that some misfortune will strike one of the players to stir up some genuine conflicts and emotions. Instead, all we get is contrived and meaningless banter and inconsequential actions. If the dialog is deep and worth pondering, then saying little and doing less can succeed, but this story bogs down in petty disagreements.
When a show works, it is easy to forgive major mistakes in its staging, but this dreadfully dull tale had me noticing them everywhere. Consider just one aspect. The story goes to great lengths to remind the audience how cold it is -- the temperature being the film's chief metaphor. Why then are there so many incongruities? 1) There is there never any frozen breath, 2) When the women complain about the wind cutting right through them, the wind is calm, 3) Actors walk around outside with their jackets unbuttoned, and 4) The teenagers are in a house in which the heat hasn't worked in a long time, yet a single smoldering log in the fireplace seems to suffice.
"I don't where I was," Chloe remarks at one point in the movie. "I don't know who I am yet." She is as lost as the story itself. With the actors' scenes edited out, we would be left with a lovely fifteen minute music video. That part is all that is worth seeing.
THE WINTER GUEST runs 1:50. It is rated R for brief nudity and a little profanity. The picture would be fine for teenagers.
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