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Thursday, August 14, 2003 Film: The height of absurdityThe Heart of Me is the worst of British costume drama
By Anthony Allison
Just because the Brits can make classy costume dramas (The Wings of the Dove, Room with a View) doesn't mean they always do. The Heart of Me, in which Helena Bonham Carter's 1930s London bohemian has a frightfully polite affair with brother-in-law Paul Bettany, is so bad its only conceivable raison d'tre is as belated revenge for the Boston tea party. Based on Rosamond Lehmann's 1953 novel The Echoing Grove, Lucinda Coxon's script is the worst ever screen adaptation of an obscure (but revered) book. Director Thaddeus O'Sullivan can do nothing much with a ploddingly predictable flashback structure and two-dimensional characters. Bonham Carter is again typecast as a spoiled, flirtatious English rose. The sibling rivalry between her and straitlaced socialite sister Olivia Williams (so effective in Rushmore, so stilted here) offers no profound insights. As their meddling mother, Eleanor Bron epitomizes self-righteous pomposity. Eventually, the whole shebang feels like a bad parody of the oh-so-English repressed emotion of Brief Encounter. Bettany (A Beautiful Mind) plays a pathetic figure, who faces daunting perils: a pregnant mistress, a snowy road and the blitz. As he walks away from an air-raid shelter you'll wish the doodlebug with his name on it would somehow obliterate the rest of this misbegotten potboiler too. |
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