I haven’t done one of these in a while. I assume you’ve all seen Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, so I don’t have to include spoiler alerts.
The difficulty with portraying writers in movies is that they’re mostly boring people, and what they do is mostly boring. Scribble scribble. In Little Women, Jo March is scribbling in her attic room by lantern light. When she finally gets the idea that she should be writing the story of her family rather than fantastical adventure stories, she starts scribbling really fast. This is fine, because I would watch Saoirse Ronan scribbling names from the telephone book. But anyway, Greta Gerwig has Ronan’s right hand cramp up, so she switches the pen to her left hand and keeps scribbling. This is a lovely touch!
And then we see the accumulating pages laid out on the attic floor. Five pages, then quick cut to ten pages, then to twenty, and so on. She’s making progress! This is fine, but I was bothered by the lanterns on the floor illuminating the pages. That’s because I had PTSD from the scene earlier in the movie when sister Amy burned Jo’s novel page by page after Jo wouldn’t let Amy join her and Laurie at the theater. Don’t put the pages of your novel near a source of fire, Jo!
In the movie we get a big, sisterly fight when Jo discovers what Amy has done, then some parental words about forgiveness from Marmy, and a couple of scenes later Jo and Laurie save Amy from drowning after she falls through some pond ice. Don’t do it, Jo and Laurie! Drowning in icy water is a fitting punishment for burning someone’s novel!
I digress. The scenes of grown-up Jo negotiating with the hard-nosed New York editor are lovely. I was afraid the whole flashback approach Gerwig came up with would be irritating, but it wasn’t at all. (The Irishman uses a double-flashback structure that also worked OK, although the complexity of the device seemed unnecessary.) Anyway, Gerwig took a big risk, I thought, when she goes all meta on us and has Jo and the editor discussing the climax to her book, and he convinces her to have a scene where the heroine gets together with her hot boyfriend Friedrich — a scene that didn’t take place in real life or in the real book. But that’s the scene we see in the movie. And it was nicely done! (The excellent 1994 version of the book just includes a comparable get-together scene with the boyfriend — Gabriel Byrne in that case — without the narrative hijinks.)
Anyway, the movie was really good. Bring your hot writer boyfriend or girlfriend to see it.
know, rabbits. Forty years later, I still look at a rabbit nibbling on some grass and I think of the word silflay.
The main character, of course, is a writer. In real life, Bryson was a middle-aged guy who took on the Appalachian Trail mainly because he had a book contract. That’s motivation enough! In the movie, he’s an old man who is taking on this challenge because he’s facing the reality of sickness and death. And the movie actually has a motif of Nick Nolte saying something like “Don’t put that in your book!” whenever something embarrassing happens, and Redford responding “I’m not writing a book!” He has a notebook, but the only thing we seem hi put into it is a note to his wife when they’re in a bit of trouble. Only at the very end, when Nolte seems to tacitly give him permission to write about their adventures, do we see Redford start the book.
articulate. Caine is insanely jealous. She comes home and in turn is jealous of him and the nanny. He decides to write a screenplay about all this. He invites the good-looking drug dealer she met in Baden Baden (Helmut Berger) to stay with them, basically trying to stage-manage his screenplay. There are complications. Jackson runs off with the drug dealer; Caine goes in pursuit. They get back together again, in an abrupt ending that neither my wife and I understood in the slightest. But perhaps that’s because we had long since stopped caring. (By the way, that sexy poster has nothing much to do with the movie, although Jackson does have a brief, weird nude scene. It’s kind of depressing to think that she’s now 78. We should all stay young and gorgeous forever!)
The writing does show up in the actual movie, of course. But they aren’t able to do much with it. We just get a peek at him now and then staring with grim determination at a blank sheet of paper or a typewriter, in between his brawls and his romances. (The young, gorgeous Julie Christie only has a few couple of scenes, but she makes, um, quite an impression.)
his son, who is in high school, and daughter, who home from college. At dinner the daughter drops the news that her novel has been accepted by a major publisher. The predictable result is that dinner is ruined. The father is upset that she abandoned the novel he has helped edit and written an entirely different book over the summer; the brother is so jealous of her success that he can’t be at the same table with her. Writers are just awful!
Academy Award nomination (she lost to herself, for The Divorcee, so I guess she couldn’t feel too bad about the defeat). But the plot is primitive, and everyone else in the case is pretty bad, particularly Robert Montgomery as her love interest, maybe because he has to say lines like this, at a moment of high drama:
Richard Bowker 