Winter's Tale condenses Mark Helprin's epic sized magical realist novel of the same name into a two hour film. It's a challenge for which the filmmakers are apparently not equipped. The film plays out as a disjointed outline of a great romance, capturing a sequence of events without any of the soul. It is a facsimile of love, featuring recognizable touch points, but none of the actual heart.
In 1915, New York thief Peter Lake (Colin Farrell) has run afoul of his mentor and patron Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe). Lake resolves to leave the city, but before he can do that, he meets the lovely but ailing Beverly Penn (Jessica Brown Findlay). Lake falls madly in love with her, and risks everything to be with her. And in so doing, he unwittingly becomes part of an eternal cosmic struggle between order and chaos that will take him across a century to perform a miracle and find his destiny.
"This is not a true story," the posters proclaim. "This is true love." The implication is that the film is a fantasy, and doesn't play by the normal rules that one would expect. Given that, it still feels like a load of nonsense. The film makes gestures at some grand meaning behind it all; an epic truth meant to leave audiences agape with wonder. But the end effect falls well short of that expectation. It all feels awfully silly and overblown. And it hardly has the sweeping scope or depth of feeling that would justify its pretensions.
There's a severe lack of whimsy to the proceedings. The film treats its story as if it was revealing the secrets of the universe. But the severe truncation means that it basically functions on childlike logic and fairytale thinking. This film would have benefitted greatly from a lighter touch, one less prone to grand statements of supposed theological significance. The self-serious tone becomes really stifling after a while, the charms of the romance overpowered by all the pomp and circumstance.
Colin Farrell has managed to stay looking pretty young over his career, but playing a twentysomething at this point still feels like a stretch. Farrell's swarthy charms are still formidable, but the film might have worked better with a more age appropriate lead. It might have at least made a better visual with Jessica Brown Findlay, who just radiates youth. And it would have struck a greater contrast with Russell Crowe, who is meant to embody an older menace. Farrell has outgrown roles like this, and his talents would best be used elsewhere.
Winter's Tale is so caught up in looking magical that it fails to be magical. It basically reduces the narrative to a set of vaguely romantic ideas: doomed romances and supernatural horses and a destined love that transcends the passage of time and death itself. But there is nothing really holding these ideas together, little sense of the whimsy and wonder that would make them work. Winter's Tale can only offer up the appearance of magic and romance. In the final accounting, the soul turns up empty.
My Rating:
