LoveFilm? Right now, I have The Green Hornet and Gainsbourg sitting on my desk (one of which I’ll watch tonight). Oh, and Disc 4 of 24 Season 1. The day’s almost over!!
Amazon? Just getting to halfway through Dickens’ David Copperfield. It’s an epic so far, really enjoying it.
Dunno if you’ve seen the theatrical version of this; I have. Reviewed it actually, funnily enough, and I remember really enjoying it. It’s not easy to depict proper horror on stage, but the play does it brilliantly well. It’s genuinely scary and, with only two actors and a fake dog, that’s pretty impressive. We’re not here to talk about the play though, obviously, but it’s relevant in a way. Everyone goes on about book-to-film adaptations and how films always tend to butcher a perfectly a good novel, and this is somewhat similar.
The film is about a lawyer called Arthur Kipps (played by Harry Potter), who is still mourning for the wife he lost during childbirth. Kipps is sent to Eel Marsh House in North East England, to sort out the papers of a woman who has recently died. Easy enough, except none of the locals want him there and make it very clear they don’t want him there. Oh, and there’s a woman. And she’s dressed in black. And she’s not very nice.
Up until about two weeks ago, I had absolutely no idea that The Woman In Black was actually a novel written in the 80s. For me, it’s always just been the play, and so any comparison with the film I make, it’ll be with the play, not the novel. And here’s the first comparison: the film is just not scary enough.
This is the best way to break it down – the movie is about 90 minutes long. The first sixty minutes are solid, entertaining and scary. The last thirty minutes are boring and disappointing. And that’s sad because the movie had been doing so well up until that last third. Really underwhelming. See, the problem is that the movie was written so that there was a satisfying ending. To send the audience home happy, apparently, but that was a mistake. Now I like the writer, Jane Goldman (Mrs Jonathan Ross!). She co-wrote Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class, both good films, so she’s talented, for sure. But she fucked it up at the end here. There’s a nice little twist at the very end, but it wasn’t enough.
Let’s talk about the first sixty minutes, quickly. I really enjoyed them. We were in a packed cinema, which was fun, especially during all the scary bits. The film is very chilling in that first hour, especially a roughly twenty-minute sequence where Harry Potter is alone in the house. The fear and the tension builds minute-by-minute, and every sound, every movement, gives you a bit of a jolt. Harry P- okay, I’ll stop calling him that now, but I found it funny. Daniel Radcliffe was very good, I thought. People complained that he looked too young for the part, but I think him looking young worked because we felt more worried for him. If there’s one thing he learnt well at Hogwarts, it was how to look scared. And he’s scared a lot in this, and never smiles, and I liked the performance. I’m sure I’ve seen Ciaran Hinds (who plays Kipps’ friend, Daily) act before, but I don’t remember. So as a sort of intro to him, I thought he was very good. The rest of the cast was just a lot of people looking scared and suspicious, but they did it well enough; and of course, the Woman herself, who screamed a lot.
In the end, though, a good story is spoiled by attempts to make it ‘cinematic’. The scene where Kipps confronts the Woman at the end, for examples, should have been fucking scary; instead, the scene lasted about two minutes, and involved a lot of screaming. Not good. I don’t know what the book’s like, or how it ends, but the play is great. And it ends well, ambiguously. Okay, yeah, the film ends ambiguously too, in some ways, but not in the good kind of the way. The disappointing way.
If you want my honest opinion, I’d say go and see it because there’s enough there for you to enjoy; and I bet that if you haven’t seen the play, you’ll like the movie much more. Good performances…scary scenes…a plainly dressed woman who screams a lot…you could do much worse. You’ll enjoy the first hour, at the very least.
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