From bigfoot.comDELETE THIS!vispo@govonca3.gov.on.ca Tue Feb 18 10:13:53 EST 1997 Article: 5242 of rec.arts.movies.reviews Path: nntphub.cb.lucent.com!not-for-mail From: bigfoot.comDELETE THIS!"vispo"@govonca3.gov.on.ca (Froilan Vispo) Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies.reviews Subject: REVIEW: MARGARET'S MUSEUM (1995) Followup-To: rec.arts.movies.current-films Date: 18 Feb 1997 13:54:45 GMT Organization: Aspiring Dilettantes Lines: 49 Sender: eleeper@lucent.com (Evelyn C. Leeper) Approved: eleeper@lucent.com Message-ID: <5eccb5$3mu@nntpb.cb.lucent.com> Reply-To: bigfoot.comDELETE THIS!"vispo"@govonca3.gov.on.ca (Froilan Vispo) NNTP-Posting-Host: mtvoyager.mt.lucent.com Summary: r.a.m.r. #06922 Keywords: author=Vispo Originator: ecl@mtvoyager Xref: nntphub.cb.lucent.com rec.arts.movies.reviews:5242 Status: O X-Status:
MARGARET'S MUSEUM
A film review by Froilan Vispo
Copyright 1997 Froilan Vispo
Treasure to be found in MARGARET'S MUSEUM
*** out of ****
Those familiar with Helena Bonham Carter from Merchant-Ivory films may be mildly surprised by her transformation from her previous prim and corseted roles to the drably dressed but earthy lead in MARGARET'S MUSEUM, a romance set in a 1940s Nova Scotia coal mining town. The gothic conclusion offers a shock seemingly disparate from the gentle melodrama, but consider it an emphatic reclamation of love lost and proclamation thereof.
Bonham Carter does admirably as Margaret, a self-described "snot-nosed whore" whose candid working-class humour conceals the loss of her father and older brother from a coal pit accident. Margaret's mother, played by Kate Nelligan in the film's best performance, is instead soured by their deaths and she makes the social rounds at the frequent funerals more out of self-interest than actual grief.
Death is a frequent visitor to Glace Bay's coal mines, and each time an accident occurs the town, alerted by sirens, gathers at the mine expecting familiar victims. The residents seem resigned to a fate linked with the mines, by far the town's largest employer, but Margaret has had enough and is defiant in her wish for a rosier future for herself and her younger brother, whose own blossoming romance is stiffly-handled and is the film's minor flaw.
Margaret meets Neil (Clive Russell), a gentle giant of an Irishman skilled with the bagpipe and many things Gaelic. His disdain for working in the coal mines echoes hers and he is set head and shoulders above the miners to Margaret. Theirs is a down to earth romance, refreshingly blunt and uninhibited. When the reality of their meagre finances hits home, Neil is forced to reconsider his aversion to the mines, and Margaret becomes reluctant about the return to a life where death is an everyday unrelenting threat.
And what will you find in Margaret's museum? Expect to find evidence of lives lost to the coal mines. Most importantly is that those lives have been reclaimed from the mines and returned to those who continue to love them.
Review completed February 12, 1997. Address e-mail for Froilan Vispo to: vispo@bigfoot.com
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