Watch Gideon's Daughter For Free

Just perfect...

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

The arrival of the year 2000 marked a series of celebration in the world. England had big plans for the arrival of the millennium, so it was only fitting the organization for the awaited event fell in one of the country's most regarded P.R. men, Gideon Warner. Gideon, in much demand, begins work into what was going to be a spectacular display from a dome that was to be the center piece of the glittering night.Gideon Warner did not come from the rich classes. As a matter of fact, he was a self made man. He has had many women in his life. As we meet him, he is living with one woman that is into the ritzy life in which Gideon moves. At one point, she comments they have received twenty seven invitations to different affairs in which his appearance is a must. Natasha, his only daughter, resents his father infidelities to her mother while she was living. In fact, Gideon committed the ultimate sin of not being by her bedside while a younger Natasha has to experience her demise because he was on the phone taking care of his personal business.When the parents of a dead boy appear at his door demanding an explanation as to why he was killed, the target is one of Gideon's clients, a politician he has been advising on his image. The grieving father wants to make the man pay for what he perceives was the cause of death, but Gideon takes him back to his office, thus preventing a bigger confrontation. Stella, the mother of the boy, is not as aggressive. In fact, Stella is a free spirit who quickly transforms Gideon from the style of life into a caring human being, bringing him closer to Natasha in the process.A television film directed by Stephen Poliakoff, was shown on a cable channel recently. It might have been distributed as a commercial feature, but we are not certain it was the case. The action takes place in 1997 and the death of Princess Diana is prominently shown as part as the action. The screenplay is by the director, who wanted perhaps to paint a broad canvas about that part of British society at the center of the action, which could well be the same as in America or other countries where the media is predominant in public affairs, and how it affects the people behind it.Bill Nighy is Gideon Warner, walking as though in a fog throughout the film. Miranda Richardson appears as Stella, a much down to earth person completely the opposite from Gideon. Their romance seems a bit far fetched, at best. A blonde Emily Blunt plays Natasha, the young woman that has grown up resenting her father and all what he stands for. Robert Lindsay serves as the narrator, in a role that does not make much sense, but he is an actor that is welcome in anything because of his winning personality.

How can be this simply story so touching? I kept asking this question for hours. Is it a parent-child relationship that everyone of us knows (at least from one of its sides) or is it something more? Or is it that lazy tempo that makes this movie so real? And I can't forget the totally beautiful song performed by Emily Blunt (Natasha). Bill Nighy's (Gideon) acting is perfect, too. Every scene in this film fits in it accurately and although the ending is filled with pathos, you'll have to like it. Because you want to believe that life goes that way. You have to see it and the best option is to watch it with your parents. It says things people should tell, but they don't.

I have now seen 'Gideon's Daughter' twice and still don't quite know how the man does it, whilst in it's glow you think it the most beautiful and spellbinding story and one wishes that it would never end. But once it does and you stand back, you realise it is actually about nothing at all, weak on story and overly sentimental and abusing the clichéd rules of scriptwriting (no telephone conversations, no narration, no flashbacks etc) with aloof disregard. You suddenly understand that a work of such quality does not have to follow antiquated misguidance, but can exist outside the usual trends and survive purely on it's own merits, characters, dialogue and empathy reign! SEE IT!

"Gideon's Daughter" brings to a TV film a trend that is mostly obvious in literary fiction – the middle-aged man who thinks he is the center of the universe and the whole world revolves around him, and faces some kind of break down if any of his women show a bit of independence.Written and directed by playwright Stephen Poliakoff, he mines similar territory as Cheever, Updike, Ford, Amis, Roth, etc. thrust into the center of English celebrity and political culture. The theme is even awkwardly made redundant by an odd structure of having another middle-aged man tell the tale to another pretty young woman and a mysterious kid.Here, Bill Nighy's media consultant only perceives such events as Princess Diana's death or the upcoming millennium in terms of how it affects him. In press interviews, Nighy has said that Poliakoff intentionally directed him to play the main character as "stripped" but one certainly doesn't see how this catatonic schmoozer even got to his professional pinnacle. His past and current sexual adventures certainly seem more male fantasy than anything based on his charisma of any kind.Tom Hardy, who was quite captivating as Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester in the recent Queen Elizabeth I mini-series, shows much more suitable feistiness, as a cross between Jeremy Piven's agent in "Entourage" and Bradley Whitford's canny adviser in "The West Wing."Miranda Richardson has the stereotyped role we've seen many times before of the quirky stranger (she dresses like an old hippie) from another class and lifestyle, but with a pained past with a child, who tempts him to play hooky and more. It is startlingly different for this genre that she is close to age appropriate.A creepy centerpiece, and repeating motif, is the consultant's daughter (Emily Blunt getting to show little of the passion she displayed in "My Summer of Love") singing a lovely ballad in tribute to philanderer Georges Simenon's suicidal daughter. The story is particularly weakened by not seeing more of Blunt's life when she's not being the adoring daughter.I really didn't get that a neglectful father who suddenly discovers he has paternal feelings is then to be considered "obsessive" rather than finally normal, even as she's about to leave the nest. His growing realization of his feelings is the best part of the film but a theme that all parents and grown children need to reconcile as adults-to-adults just drifts off.