marsanobill

Boring, and featuring characters about whom it is impossible to give one whit, it moves at a pace somewhere between arthritic and glacial. It is aggressively stagey, the plot is impenetrably convoluted, the characters'' motivations stem entirely on the scriptwriter's say-so, and the acting is so wooden you can count the growth rings. The dialogue is similarly atrocious. The plot revolves--or totters, actually--around the task of a young-genius landscape designer, who has beem hired to create a garden of the kind that will be remembered forever (a la Versailles and Sissinghurst) as the legacy of a nobody but rich English merchant who has no children to carry on his name We are expected to believe that HE believes a garden is the way to achieve this. Magical realism is also thrown on top of everything else. Did I forget to include intimations of witchcraft? And the supernatural?

This movie will make you wonder what you did in a former life to deserve such punishment.

Yes, yes, yes--Applegate, Cardellini and don't forget Riva's wonderfully deadpan Detective Riva. The comedy and the black comedy; the wit; the surprises that are never telegraphed; the incredible complexity that always somehow makes sense; the brilliant writing, always on point and without any padding.. It's always riveting and the chemistry between Applegate and Cardeilini is something to behold. Even the lesser characters stand out as three-dimensional people. I haven't seen anything else this good in years. Whoever at Netflix greenlighted this project deserves a medal, as do all of the people who carried it through to completion.

Contains spoilers. This is truly second-rate Le Carre, his first post-Cold War effort, when he was clearly groping for what to do next. The big idea here is (surprise) that the international arms dealers are Bad People. That, and many liberties taken by the adaptors have resulted in nothing more than a blood-and-explosion filled James Bond popcorn fest dragged out two episodes too long. Olivia Colman and Tom Hollander are terrific. Hugh Laurie is tedious with his Penetrating Stare, which passes here for acting.Tom Hiddleston is pretty but so wooden you could use him to kill vampires Lovely locations. Most plot turns are hardly credible, as is the ending. Le Carre was noted for his bleak view of the espionage business, and there is some of that here: the good guys are of course being sabotaged by bent members of their own government. But I don't see here what Le Carre was noted for, his ambiguity and his small and painful victories. Instead, we get all Bondy at the end: the bad guy is destroyed, the good guy gets the babe (a leggy blonde who doesn't talk much) and a $300 million bank account.