La gran isla

Beautifully staged and photographed, I did not find the film so bad as the first reviewer. McGillis is indeed turgid, but the other actors generally do at least as well as they should. Pasdar is, in fact, rather good.

More important, the movie does violence to the story in at least two important ways. First, Chopin in no way implies that Edna and Robert ever bedded one another. The movie, though we see no congress (as we do between Edna and Arobin), strongly implies they are in fact lovers, tainting their amour with the potential for guilt, of which the book knows nothing. Second, the movie jumps right past the real reason Robert decides to leave Edna, viz. because he wants to marry her, something she would not do if she could. The realization that her rather illusionary perception of Robert is off the mark is part of what sends her on the long swim. Even the man she has her heart set on would put her right back in the cage.

As the movie tells the story, Edna ends up a desperate housewife whose amour manqué ends in a punitive suicide. She'll show them! The story has problems enough without those deviations.