February is the time of year for flowers, sentimental greeting cards and the Russell Stover heart-shaped box of chocolates. On top of that, Hollywood often gift wraps a romantic love story almost perfect for the occasion.
Well, that’s not the case for “Winter’s Tale,” a sappy romance tale that stretches credibility to the breaking point and tosses in a mix of supernatural mumbo-jumbo and good versus evil battles that may easily confuse or confound an audience primed for traditional fare.
The film marks the directorial debut of Academy Award-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldman (“A Beautiful Mind”). Aside from the scenery, there’s nothing really beautiful about this exercise into a fantasy world beyond any sort of tangible credibility.
Set in New York City, the story spans more than a century, starting with the fateful day in 1895 that a baby is set adrift on a model boat in the harbor outside Manhattan, as his prospective immigrant parents are forced from Ellis Island to return to their country of origin.
Flash forward to 1916, the orphan child is now an adult, in this case Colin Farrell’s Peter Lake, who matured on the streets of Brooklyn as a member of the Short Tails gang, under the tutelage of vicious crime lord Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe, bearing horrible facial scars).
A master thief who wants out of the business, Peter has been marked for a violent death by his one-time mentor. Ambushed by Pearly and his gang of black-suited goons, Peter makes an escape on a beautiful white steed, a mythical Pegasus.
The mysterious white stallion, acting as a guardian angel capable of taking flight, always appears at the right moment to whisk Peter away from impending danger. Yet, over a century’s time, Peter only calls his savior “Horse.”
When not busy repelling the brutal forces of Pearly’s henchmen, Peter can’t quite shake his thieving past, and so he breaks into the Victorian mansion of a newspaper magnate (William Hurt), when it appears the family is away.
Breaking into the home and finding the wall safe is easy. The hard part comes in encountering the unexpected presence of Beverly Penn (Jessica Brown Findlay), the lovely daughter left behind as she copes with a losing battle against consumption, which requires maintaining a low body temperature by frequent exposure to the cold.
After meeting Beverly, Peter loses all thought of his illegal craft, and soon falls madly in love with the liberated, eccentric and inscrutable free spirit. So this is where the love story kicks in, though it appears to be ill-fated due to Beverly’s short life expectancy.
As Beverly and Peter first get acquainted in the drawing room of the family estate, Beverly asks “what’s the best thing you’ve ever stolen?” Peter replies “I’m beginning to think I haven’t stolen it yet.”
I don’t know if this dialogue is contained in Mark Helprin’s acclaimed nearly 800-page paperback novel of the same title, but in the context of the chance encounter afforded a few minutes in a two-hour movie, it comes across as syrupy romantic hokum.
In any case, as the Pearly Soames gang bears down on Peter, the two lovebirds escape the city, courtesy of the white horse, to the Penn country estate on the Hudson River, where the love story continues to unfold.
Handy in many things mechanical, Peter slowly wins over Beverly’s family, particularly the distrustful patriarch, with his sincere love and care for the slowly dying beautiful redhead.
Meanwhile, back in Manhattan, Pearly visits Lucifer (Will Smith) in his underground bunker, mainly to seek permission to leave the city limits to hunt Peter. Absurdly, Lucifer flares his nostrils and bares sharp fangs. Wisely, Will Smith has no credits in this film.
Not so much luck for Colin Farrell, who often has the sheepish look of being trapped in this mystical nonsense. On another occasion, Peter asks “Is it possible to love someone so completely they simply can’t die?” Maybe so, in a movie that allows one to leap through time.
After Pearly and his gang get the better of Peter by tossing him from the Brooklyn Bridge, he later emerges in the present time, looking like a homeless guy in Central Park, drawing sketches of a redheaded girl on the pavement.
Here, he encounters journalist Virginia (Jennifer Connelly) and her little daughter (Ripley Sobo), who just might be the person he is meant to save. Don’t ask me how or why.
Oddly enough, Virginia works for the newspaper now run by Beverly’s youngest sibling, Willa (Eva Marie Saint), who most improbably remembers Peter from nearly a century earlier. If I am doing my math properly, I would think that Willa is well over 100 and even less likely to be running a publishing empire.
“Winter’s Tale” is mostly a puzzle. At times, it’s a love story and at other times, it’s Russell Crowe acting all fearlessly tough and brutal. The story believes in miracles but there’s not one to be had to rescue this supernatural soapy, sentimental tale.
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.
We human beings think we’re pretty special when compared to the “lower” forms of life, but now and then nature puts us in our place. Here’s an untitled short poem by Jonathan Greene, who lives in the outer Bluegrass region of Kentucky.
Untitled
Honored when the butterfly lights on my shoulder.
Next stop: a rotting log.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright 2001 by Jonathan Greene, whose most recent book of poems is Distillations and Siphonings, Broadstone Books, 2010. Poem reprinted from blink, September-October 2001, vol. 1, no. 2, by permission of Jonathan Greene and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
One of the founders of modernist poetry, Ezra Pound, advised poets and artists to “make it new.” I’ve never before seen a poem about helping a tree shake the snow from itself, and I like this one by Thomas Reiter, who lives in New Jersey.
Releasing a Tree
Softly pummeled overnight, the lower limbs of our Norway spruce flexed and the deepening snow held them. Windless sunlight now, so I go out wearing hip waders and carrying not a fly rod but a garden hoe. I begin worrying the snow for the holdfast of a branch that’s so far down a wren’s nest floats above it like a buoy. I work the hoe, not chopping but cradling, then pull straight up. A current of air as the needles loft their burden over my head. Those grace notes of the snowfall, crystals giving off copper, green, rose—watching them I stumble over a branch, go down and my gloves fill with snow. Ah, I find my father here: I remember as a child how flames touched my hand the time I added wood to the stove in our ice-fishing shanty, how he plunged that hand through the hole into the river, teaching me one kind of burning can ease another. The branch bobs then tapers into place and composes itself, looking unchanged though all summer it will bring up this day from underfoot.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright 2013 by Thomas Reiter, whose most recent book of poems is Catchment, Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2009. Poem reprinted from The Southern Review, Vol. 49, no. 1, by permission of Thomas Reiter and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
LUCERNE, Calif. – The Lucerne Alpine Senior Center, 3985 Country Club Drive, is hosting Open Mic Lucerne on Saturday, Feb. 22, from 6 to 11 p.m.
The event is usually every third Saturday of the month but this month it’s the fourth Saturday marking this fun rock and roll event.
Signed up performers are on stage after the house band FOGG starts out the evening with classic and heavy metal rock and roll. FOGG and other entertainers also wrap up the evening by 11 p.m.
Bands and individuals are already signing up so sign up early. Call 707-245-4612 or 707-274-8779 for your time or come and signups on site beginning at 5 p.m. Saturday night. Don’t miss this chance.
If you are a performer, this is a great venue to show off your talent. Music, comedy, mime, readings and any other activity that is family-oriented will be appreciated.
Room is available for dancing and relaxing. There is no charge for attendance or performance.
This is a child friendly event, so bring the whole family. For those wishing an inexpensive snack, food is available starting at $2 per plate.
All proceeds from the meal benefit the Lucerne Alpine Senior Center, a not-for-profit that serves Northshore senior populations with on site lunches, Meals on Wheels and advocacy.
For more information about services or OML, call Lucerne Alpine Senior Center at 707-274-8779.
Fighting the Nazis to save Western civilization? How can you miss with such easy targets as Adolf Hitler and his uncivilized henchmen embarked on a mission to destroy art treasures that define the very essence of European culture?
Assembling a hardy band of soldiers to go behind enemy lines during World War II should be something like “The Dirty Dozen.” The result would have been plenty of high stakes action.
On the other hand, “The Monuments Men,” directed by and starring George Clooney, is more like “Ocean’s Eleven,” yet mostly absent the tension and excitement of a Vegas casino heist caper fraught with peril and fear of failure.
Of course, another slight problem for creating daring wartime exploits is that the experts of the art world are older guys who have the professional background and necessary grounding in cultural affairs that would elude the typical draft-age Army recruit.
Based on Robert M. Edsel’s bestselling nonfiction book “The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History,” the film is intended to be a true account even though the names of the principal figures are pseudonyms.
Sanctioned by the American government, as President Roosevelt and General Eisenhower came to understand the importance of saving cultural heritage, a group of middle-aged and out-of-shape of art historians, architects and artists was organized.
The answer to saving cultural treasures was the formation of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) group, in which George Clooney’s Frank Stokes, a leading art historian at Harvard’s Fogg Museum, was a natural leader given his wartime experience in World War I.
Stokes organizes a group of like-minded individuals, who are too old to be drafted or serve voluntarily as soldiers, but since they may come under fire, they have to go through basic training.
Stokes is joined by Matt Damon’s art expert James Granger, John Goodman’s sculptor Walter Garfield, Bill Murray’s architect Richard Campbell and Jean Dujardin’s art dealer Jean Claude Clermont, a French Jew based in Marseilles.
Other members of the group include the colorful Hugh Bonneville’s British aristocrat Donald Jeffries, a flawed man seeking a second chance, and Bob Balaban’s art historian and theatrical impresario Preston Savitz.
The only real soldier and young person in the MFAA group is Dimitri Leonidas’ Sam Epstein, recruited because he speaks German, knows his way around the battlefront and comes in handy as the driver.
As to be expected from past film outings, Clooney affords his character and that of Matt Damon several opportunities to engage in playful bantering, even though they remain earnestly serious about the mission.
Damon’s Granger gets extra comic mileage with his mangling of the French language, which he apparently learned in Montreal, to the point that no French person wishes to engage him in their native tongue.
The Monuments Men find a valuable, if somewhat wary and skeptical, ally in occupied France with Cate Blanchett’s Claire Simone, a curator at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris, which the Nazis had converted to a warehouse of stolen art works.
Risking her life to secretly catalog the locations of pilfered art, Simone wants to be sure the Allies won’t simply keep the recovered masterpieces for their own collections of art.
In the late stages of the war, fearing his own demise and Germany’s loss, Hitler issued the so-called Nero Decree that everything the Nazis had amassed was going to be destroyed, so that nothing would fall into the hands of the victors, including the art treasures.
Understanding the implications to civilization, Granger and Simone forge an unusual bond, not a romantic love one, but rather a mutual love of art and culture, along with a passion to save masterpieces for a noble reason.
Not satisfied with being the catalyst behind the Monuments Men mission, Clooney’s Stokes also gets the benefit of uttering the most exalted dialogue, sermonizing about the great value in a civilized world of saving art treasures.
“The Monuments Men” arguably could have used more action and excitement, but then this is not a war epic. A sense of urgency to saving the priceless works of art is the film’s saving grace.
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.
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