A lump of unmalleable literariness, extracted from a novel by Graham Swift. We have once again the illusion-shattering device of obviously different actors playing the same character at different ages, a device made doubly intolerable by the continual switching back and forth in time and the fairly equal amounts of minutes on screen. And we have also large mouthfuls of first-person narration, albeit with a "plausible" reason for it. It's not just reading aloud, but rather the ongoing lectures of a high-school history teacher who, in a hazily lit Pittsburgh classroom, tops off his lessons on the French Revolution with tales of his own turbulent past. Some of the students are disturbed by these digressions, understandably so when Jeremy Irons pushes his agitation and twitchiness to the very doorsill of lunacy, or at least the doorsill of Peter O'Toole. More of the students, most notably the badly behaved and badly acting (two different things) Ethan Hawke, seem to find these tales more "relevant" than, say, the Oath of the Tennis Court. This is made abundantly clear, even excessively clear, when the class accompany their teacher on a sort of field trip into the oldendays, in a touring car festooned with red and white bunting, to observe past events firsthand. (The visual aids for the lectures on the French Revolution are limited just to color slides.) The fen country of the teacher's native England comes to life vividly if fleetingly, but the revelations of murder(!), madness(!!), and incest(!!!), when you come right down to them, are insufficiently uplifted by the fancy narrative needlework. Directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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