Winter's Tale

Synopsis: The story of Peter Lake (Colin Farrell), a petty thief who during the act of robbing the home of her wealthy father (William Hurt), falls in love with Beverly Penn (Jessica Brown Findlay), a young woman dying of consumption.

Winter's Tale is, to say the least, a head-scratcher. After a present day introductory section it reels back to 1916 looking like it intends to be a kind of post-script to Gangs Of New York. Within minutes, however, Colin Farrell is astride a flying white horse, something which takes him by surprise but not his thuggish pursuer, Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe) who, having been thwarted in his villainous intent to destroy Peter, makes obscure allusions to miracles and related metaphysical phenomena. Move a little bit further on and it seems that Soames is not of this world. Indeed, eventually it transpires that he’s a henchman for Beelzebub, played, for no apparent reason, by Will Smith endowed with a Darth Vaderish voice.

Much, if not all of the film is like this and most audiences are going to be trying to figure out what is going on and, even more grievously, why, rather than actually being transported into its make-believe world.  Released on the eve of Valentine’s Day the aim is presumably to pass it off as a supernatural love story but it is simply not strong enough in this department to persuade any but the most indulgent whilst what appears to be its main agenda, a kind of M. Night Shyamalan-style beyond-the-veil speculation, is so woolly-headed that one would need to be borderline delusional to buy into it. Life Of Pi looks like social realism in comparison.

First time director Akiva Goldsman has been associated as a writer and producer with a string of big Hollywood hits such as I Am Legend (2007) and A Beautiful Mind (2001) which no doubt explains not only the presence of Smith and Crowe and Jennifer Connelly who starred in those films, but also why Warners were willing to back the project, apparently with an initial budget of $75 million but eventually dropping it to $46 million. Good call, but that's still a lot of moolah to kiss goodbye to.

Adapted by the director from a 1983 novel by Mark Helprin, it evidently was a project that meant a lot to him and one wants to back someone who tackles such off-the-wall subject matter. The sad news, however, is that Goldsman’s treatment is so direly conventional that it fails to conjure up any of the requisite sense of the mysterious or the magical. Worldly logic and flight of fantasy tangle and both come off the worse for wear. Indeed, at times the film is so maladroit as to have a certain ghoulish appeal. This is so particularly in the last act which returns us to present-day New York and Jennifer Connelly with a cute-as daughter dying of cancer. What was vaguely acceptable with the remove of history becomes painfully unconvincing and both Farrell, who up to this point had been doing a reasonable job of selling the tale, and Connelly are both exactly that. The score by Hans Zimmer and Rupert Gregson-Williams is ham-fistedly formulaic and about the only thing positive that one can say is that Caleb Deschanel’s cinematography makes for a good-looking misfire.

Word has it that Martin Scorsese originally purchased the film rights to Winter's Tale but gave up on it as unfilmable. Goldsman would have done well to have taken note. 

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