An Awfully Big Adventure (1988, Mike Newell)
The plot description for this movie really couldn’t have appealed to me more. Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant in a Mike Newell movie about life in a theatre in the 40s. Sounds like right up my alley.
So what went wrong? I don’t really know, but somehow it didn’t completely gel, and it turned out to be less engaging than I thought it was going to be.
The acting is all good, and I like how Newell focuses more on his characters than his plot, making everyone seem just a little bit more human. His storytelling is excellent, but the story itself is a bit meandering, and you never really know where it’s going. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I never got any sense of urgency.
Until the end, that is. The end is what saved this movie for me. Instead of what is nowadays passed off as a “plot twist”, this screwed up ending is totally out of the blue, and completely heartbreaking.
This is a nice little movie, and even though it didn’t completely work for me, it’s worth checking out. Very dark, depressing, and cynical. Too bad it’s largely been forgotten.
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