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Perfect cast and a good story

Excellent adaptation.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This movie gets a rating of a 3 by me because of Ian McKellen. His acting and his character are superior to everyone else in this film. I did not like the acting of Ms. Unger nor Ms. Crane. It seems as though they were sleepwalking. Also, the movie's score was incredibly annoying and downright intrusive. This is how the score was: 4 to 7 notes on the piano, 3 to 11 notes on the cello, repeat and repeat and repeat. Do you get the picture? I cannot tell you how many times I had to mute the sound on my player because I could not take any more of this mind bending tedious music. Also, I did not like how the director set up the flashback sequences. I noticed that on the DVD special features section he felt it was really creative. However, I felt that it just gave Mr McKellen more screen time. Also, it was equally not compelling to cast the mother and daughter in other roles for the flashback sequences. I was so confused and exasperated with this director. The other reason I am giving this movie a 3 is because it was wonderful to see Vancouver and British Columbia for all its beauty. Well, if you want to watch this film and you're sensitive to music, I would suggest you do the same that I did. Simply put, press mute when you see a lot of sequences where there's no talking because you can bet your bottom dollar that horrendous score is going to be creeping into your ears.

McKellen plays a senior UK academic returning to Canada to receive an honorary degree. He stays with his niece (Unger) who is newly separated (that's her hubby off the budget) and her grumpy adolescent daughter. Relations are frosty at first until the issue gets aired, which sets our hero off on a journey down memory lane to his troubled family farm on the prairies. Everything revolves around McKellen and his character, whom we have to believe and care about. Sadly, we learn almost nothing about him apart from an initial glimpse of his college rooms and a dumpy woman "assistant" (with the muted suggestion that he is gay). We do not even learn anything about his scientific studies, the focus of his life's work, so his character would not pass the elementary requirements of a screen writing software package. How scripts with structural problems like this get green-lighted by national film-funding bodies is beyond me. There is a further problem with Unger's character, when she asks the professor: "Do you remember my mother?" and he says "not really", thus removing any possibility of dealing with the orphaned Unger's most important relationship. A further problem arises with the flashback passages in which we glimpse his brothers, but not well enough to understand their motivations or his relationship with them. Finally, the script fails to provide an adequate breakthrough to resolve his situation, and the pay-off is therefore unsatisfying. However, because the film is intelligently filmed and directed, these faults are not hidden, and the film works in spite of them, particularly for McKellen fans who love his puckish face and plummy accent.

In the second part of a twin bill for Ian McKellen, he stars with Deborah Kara Unger in a compelling drama about a man who goes back home after 40 years and has to deal with the past he left behind.In contrast to Cold Comfort Farm, in which McKellan played a small role, this movie is all about him. He goes back and forth from the present to his life in Canada 40 years before. He even engages in conversations with his brothers, who appear in the present. he works to resolve his crisis and, with the help of 10-year-old Theo Crane, is able to come to a comfortable conclusion.For those of us who leave home and return, there is a lot of things familiar in this very good movie.

I liked the movie a lot more than I expected. Not that I thought it was going to be a bad movie, but I had no real concept of what I'd think of it so really enjoying it was a nice surprise. We had heard it was slow, but I actually found it to be quite gripping and as such it didn't appear slow at all. At first it was a little distracting watching the movie with Ian McKellen two rows behind us and a couple of seats along, but my focus settled down as we got further in. Not particularly helped by the antarctic blasts of cold coming from the air conditioning right in front of me. I'm lucky I didn't die of hypothermia before the end of the evening. The movie was much more easily identified with than you might expect, being a movie about a 65 year old man and me being anything but. The theme was something I think can get to anyone and what really got me was the story of Emile leaving his two brothers behind and what happened to them subsequently. I think anyone who moves away from their family can understand the need to separate and how easy it can be to let that separation become too vast. As someone who has never lost a close member of my family, and lives in vague terror of the day it finally happens (as it must do unless I'm hit by a bus in the near future), I found the movie very touching and even teared up a couple of times. On a less precise scale, Emile's flaw was that he ran away from responsibility and difficulty and as a result never really lived his life, as far as we can tell. It's always easy to tell ourselves that what we're doing is for the best, but often that can be an excuse for not doing something that seems too hard.The only flaw I would pick with the movie is that occasionally the music was a little too much. Aside from that the acting was excellent, the script was excellent and the shooting was beautifully done. I think a lot more people will find something to associate with in this movie than might think they would. Have you ever moved away from home? Have you ever not kept in touch when you knew you should? Have you ever been hurt by or betrayed a family member?