The Other Wife

Just turned the TV on, watched literally a few minutes of this and am absolutely stunned that Rupert Everett is in something so, so dreadful! The acting is absolutely appalling... I felt physically uncomfortable at the awkward physicality between the characters and their hammy yet wooden performances... I watched for another fifteen minutes in the hope I had caught it at a bad moment, but nope... What on earth happened?

Didn't realize this was a mini series because I watched it on Tubi but oh my word this goes SO slow with a lot of extra fluff added in that is not necessary for the plot. I can't see how anyone will care about the daughter's ballet career or half the other stuff written into this plot to make it longer. I forwarded through a lot of it to get to the meat. Not sure how to wrap this up except to say I'd pass if I were you.

I thoroughly enjoyed this soapy family drama. Nothing like Rosamunde would have written, but still it is domestic and romantic. Two wives of the same man, both nice women, betrayed by John Hanna, the conflicted bigamist. The collision course they are set on kept the tension dialed up to medium high and when the truth is finally revealed it was suitably dramatic. Throw in an estranged father, a plane crash, bankruptcy, a boyfriend stealing sister, a war-hero love interest lurking in the background, a cheating lying brother, financial shenanigans, a daughter jealous of her mother, a heart attack, and a gold mine and I'm all in. Also ballerinas! Seriously what more could you ask for?

This is an excruciatingly boring 2 episode movie with very pretty scenery and locales and bad acting. Perhaps I should cut them some slack - maybe the screenplay/dialogue was a collaboration written by the 9th grade creative writing class of 2010. Rupert Everett, however, presumably could have risen above his portrayal of a cartoonish stoop shouldered Snidely Whiplash. Horrendous performance. He has forever tainted himself.

Rosamund Pilcher is an entertaining author and I hope she did not live to see this rendition of her book. I struggled through it on 4 separate occasions, just to get through it for Rosamund. In the first episode, I longed for the plane crash. Just SOMETHING interesting. And it wasn't. Going forward, I longed for the stiff and awkward ballet scenes to end quickly. They didn't. Terrible, very predictable movie.

I gave this movie quite a high rating because I rather enjoyed it. It was very, very bad in the characters, the plot lines, the direction, in pretty much everything. But the movie was one you could watch with granny or teenage offspring without feeling embarrassed. How many movies can one say that about nowadays? Now, while the characters were nearly all wooden, almost catatonic, they looked pretty enough or sinister enough, almost like a parody of TV movie-making. There were great gaps in which nothing much happened, when the stars (I use the term advisedly) seemed to have forgotten their lines or the director had perhaps popped out for a coffee (or ring his agent). Nevertheless, it was the equivalent of the endless "Schlager" (German pop songs) I used to hear (but not listen to) when I was a guest worker in 1970s West Germany. And I think, if I recall rightly, it didn't rain once throughout the whole three hours of the movie! What's not to like about such a nice, fluffy puppy of a movie that just wants its tummy tickled?