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Stephen Gyllenhaal's Waterland brings to life a
very dark script by Peter Prince based on a Graham Swift novel. It
tells the story of an aging prep school history professor (Jeremy
Irons) who is losing his grip on his students and his sanity. To
capture student interest and acceptance, he begins to tell the rather
lurid story of his youth in The Fens, the flat wet Northern area of
England. It is the story of his ancestors, and then of his own life
with his wife Mary. It is, I suppose, a ripping yarn, including
adolescent sex, murder, abortion, a reprobate grandfather who was a
brewer, and much more. Meanwhile, in the present day, his wife has
become overly religious, and has kidnapped a baby, all as a result of
what happened to them as teenagers.
Most critics feel that Waterland had many good features, but didn't
really work. Public acceptance has been much better. Although it
grossed just over $1M in a US theatrical release, IMDb readers now say
6.6. I was not as impressed as those readers, but it is not my sort of
material. Irons was brilliant, and Sinéad Cusack as the older Mary
was top-notch, making me believe that she had gone quietly batty
living with her past secret, but the story is unrelentingly dark,
somber and depressing, start to finish, and I didn't find the same
visual appeal to the area that Gyllenhaal did, nor could I see any
reason why he moved Tom and Mary Crick to Pittsburgh, even though the
remembrances are all in England. Most important, the story simply led
nowhere. Throughout the telling, I hoped that Irons had some brilliant
plan, and would tie the stories to some life-changing history lesson
for the students, but it wasn't to be, and he even used his forced
retirement assembly to finish the story. |
