Whoa, what happened here? I haven’t read the source novel, but I have enjoyed the last few books from Ian McEwan. Roger Michell made Persuasion, perhaps my favorite Jane Austen movie, and his Notting Hill was a better than expected romantic comedy. Samantha Morton is a reliably enthralling actress, and Daniel Craig and Rhys Ifans have been interesting elsewhere. So how did their combined efforts go so wrong? The first thing that got on my nerves was the aggressive color design, in which everything goes green to convey the protagonist’s obsession with what happened to him one afternoon in England’s green and pleasant land. Except for splashes of red, meant to recollect the hot air balloon that descended from heaven that day, into the green landscape, falling in distress. Anyway, a group of passers-by grab on to the gondola to rescue the boy inside, but a gust of wind carries it aloft, and they drop off in sequence till the balloon soars up and the last one falls to his death. It’s an arresting setup, but goes nowhere, which the insistent color scheme simply rubs in. Just because Antonioni did it, doesn’t make it arty when you do. I won’t describe the character development, because I didn’t believe any of it. This movie kept getting worse as it went, but like a frog in a slowly-come-to-boil pot I never had the sense to opt out. (2004, dvd, n.) *3* (MC-61, RT-60.)
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