Slow, agonizing, self-indulgent, disappointing...yet gripping!
Written: Apr 29 '08
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good acting, excellent London film locations, some decent dialogue, minor plot movement
Cons: A drag, ends nowhere, leaves a viewer empty
The Bottom Line: Not much here to get a brain or heart moving, but worth a look if others' depressions interest you. A well-filmed story of misery!
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| frwhiskey's Full Review: Gideon's Daughter |
Here is a very long drawn out British film which, simply stated, presents this plot: widowed, once philandering man, now old and grim but at the peak of his work, finds himself deeply depressed at his teenage daughter's anger towards him. He becomes listless, inattentive to his own life, obsessed with his daughter and her near departure for university. He drops his current lover, picks up a new one spontaneously. She's a chirpy working-class woman who'd lost a young son,spotted arguing on the street down below his office window.
Ultimately, after we, the viewers, are dragged through this stoical man's deadness, we find that he, his new lover (married herself, of course) and his daughter simply all disappear. And that is the end! What a plot!
Our main protaganist is a very disenchanted feigning-upper-class man of 60 plus, tall, thin and grim. His frozen-featured face has a remarkable resemblance to the blank flatness of Putin's.
It's very hard, if not impossible, to like this man; he is a dessicated soul who doesn't hear anyone else. When the plot reveals his low and foreign (Polish) origins, it is a boring bit of news for us.
His daughter is lean and mean-faced, an only-child teenager of wealth and priviledge, but nevertheless twisted by the cancer death of her mother. Her greatest wish is to run away from her life, off to the jungles of South America, with her father's money of course, but to get away from him primarily. He begs her to stay in a flat, almost deadpan Finnish way. She stares blankly back. To her credit, she does do the blank look very well!
Our lively new love interest is a 40ish hippy woman, dressed in wild clothes and dying her hair odd shades of red. She is full of life, works hard at a crappy job, lives badly in a working class neighborhood, and tries to forget her dead son. Her husband rants frantically to anyone who will listen about the boy, but who will? They appear to be separated, but that is not clear. Irrelevant? Again, that is not clear, either...does this aging father's earlier betrayals to his now-dead wife matter....when he seems to think not? Why is the daughter so angry, then?
Does any of this tempt you so far? In some bizarre way, other people's misery does interest us, at least in a Schadenfreude way, so I took the film home with some hopes. Its sheer lack of hope or meaning leaves one dead and dull inside; in fact, perhaps even points to the need for faith, as we see characters with no belief stumble about blindy in anger and depression, to find in the end no solution except "geographical relocation", i.e. run away and start again. Certainly an old tried-and-true way!
If you get tired halfway through, don't plow on. I did, and it led nowhere, to more of the same. I sighed, slept.
What the director Poliakoff had in mind, I cannot say. Perhaps I am missing it altogether, perhaps in its nothingness, there is a deep message.
All this being said, the acting was superb, the shots of London life, high and low, are a great background. Princess Diana's death and all its flowers come up again and again, yet shed no light on life for these poor folks.
Well, what can I say? Worth a look when you're down?
No, wrong time to view it! Stay analytical for this one!
Recommended:
No
Viewing Format: DVD
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Epinions.com ID:
frwhiskey
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Location: San Francisco,CA
Reviews written: 173
Trusted by: 16 members
About Me:
Curmudgeonly yet whimsical, I'm a San Francisco tourguide full of vim and vinegar.
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