campbellharper

Everything I've seen about this movie led me to think it would be a mediocre, run of the mill Hollywood movie of its time. But it's really much more than that. It's a full-fledged drama in its own right that consistently makes interesting, creative choices throughout.

Any praise of the movie has to start with the plot, and I assume the literary source material was reproduced with fidelity. To put it plainly, the three main plots that make up this movie are nuanced, just straight nuanced. Each of them is a bit of a stock set-up, such as Julia Roberts' plotline where the poor girl dates a rich boy, but it never feels like they're just going through the motions. They treat each plot as if it hasn't been done before, give it the attentive rendering it deserves, and let us feel a whole range of things about what's going on.

The characters themselves are very unexpected. You think you know them at a glance, but they continually surprise you. Here the dialogue is a great asset. The characters never say dumb things just to establish a plot point; everything they say expresses their personality, their way of seeing the world. And whoever wrote it has a real ear for actual speech.

Strange to say, this movie is realistic. The main characters are all poor Portuguese-Americans in small town Connecticut. Although obviously the clothes and all that are more expensive than these poor girls would actually be able to buy, the characters really do live, talk, and think like people in their situation do (speaking from experience!). This is Hollywood as a tidier-up of reality, not as pure fabrication.

And best of all, the movie maintains all of these things for its whole duration. I was impressed from the get-go, and things just kept continuing in a satisfying way. So often movies (especially in the 90s) would cut short anything creative or interesting that cropped up in the first half of the movie, and channel it all into formulaic mush. But the ending is as real, as unexpected, and as nuanced as the beginning was.

So believe you me, this movie deserves a lot more than the measly 6.3 stars that it has at the moment!

I feel ambivalent about this film, mostly because so much of what's good about it seems to verge on self-parody. Take the premise: a man goes to a sleepy Yorkshire village to spend "a month in the country." He's been hired to restore a painting in the church. While he's there he meets a few interesting characters, gets a sense of the social lay of the land, has some brushes with love, and generally gets to chill out.

What bothers me about this premise is that people already come to British period films for a cozy, soothing experience where understated social interactions are paired with picturesque landscapes. "A Month in the Country" takes this to such an extreme that it almost embarrasses me.

Now, it has some reason to be so soothing, since one of the main themes is healing. The protagonist was in the First World War and was obviously very traumatized in it. This month in the country is like a mental health vacation for him. (And can't we all enjoy fantasizing about taking a mental health vacation --- one that actually improves our mental health?)

I suppose my real discomfort with the film is that so much talent and vision were put into something that feels like the cinematic equivalent of ASMR.

Well, those are my qualms, but I liked the movie a lot, so I should say something about that. The degree of suggestive understatement in this film is unreal. Instead of a traditional plot, events are left to hang in the air, rarely picked up again later (or, when they are picked up again, treated with a bit of a slant). As the film goes on and these images and moments pile up, a complex texture of insinuation begins to run beneath every scene. The gist of this is partly thematic, pertaining to healing and religion (which is the film's other big theme), but I'm happy to say it's not overwhelmingly so. I find films that are too thematic tend to feel airless and unreal. No, the thinking behind the meandering events of "A Month in the Country" seems to have been that life is unpredictable and will throw things at you that you don't exactly know what to do with. This is the old Chekhovian plotless plot trick (although I would prefer to trace it back further to Turgenev, who also wrote his own "A Month in the Country"), but novelist J. L. Carr and director Pat O'Connor make it shine here.

I enjoyed this movie a lot and I'm sad, actually, that nothing like this gets made anymore. It seems as if people have lost the knack for this level of subtlety.

Now that's beautiful filmmaking. The words "cinematography" don't do justice to the visual splendour on show here. It's not just that the shots are well-composed and the locations beautiful (we see some of Lisbon's abundant architectural and natural beauty) --there's a sense of atmosphere that pervades the whole film and makes every shot feel emotional, meaningful. The pace is leisurely, just right, and along with the low-key story helps us soak it all in. I also have to nod towards the beautiful string accompaniment, never intrusive but always lovely.

But the ending... (I promise no spoilers). I was willing to go along with the story, which is a bit thin but works great as a pretext for the visuals and atmosphere. But we never really understand the characters. We just see them go on with their lives. The ending just seems to come out of nowhere in a totally gratuitous way. It's the kind of thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, lowers my opinion of the people behind the camera, and makes it hard for me to recommend it to others without reservations. But all the same, it's a beautiful little neorealist gem.