Goodbye 2014! You brought us many terrible movies, but one truly stands above the rest…
Director: Akiva Goldsman
Stars: Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe
In a love story that spans a century, a runaway thief falls for a dying aristocratic girl and must protect her from a demon gangster with the help of his magical flying horse.
^ This is the real plot.
It should be no surprise that WINTER’S TALE is a complete disaster as a film, since it marks the directorial debut of the guy who wrote BATMAN AND ROBIN. Sure, Akiva Goldsman won an Oscar for A BEAUTIFUL MIND a few years later, but the man has mostly made a career writing/producing middling crap. LOST IN SPACE, I ROBOT, THE DA VINCI CODE, JONAH HEX—the list goes on. Why should his first effort behind the camera be any good?
At least it’s entertaining in its unfathomable badness!
Every now and then, Colin Farrell likes to visit the place where his career is buried.
Based on Mark Helprin’s famous 1983 novel, WINTER’S TALE has been a long time coming to the screen. Everyone from Spielberg to Scorsese has considered adapting it, with Scorsese eventually dubbing the book “unfilmable.” It’s not hard to see his reasoning: there’s no good way to take a high-concept 700 page text with an epic timeline, mythological characters and heavy thematics, and turn it in to a two-hour movie. And Goldsman’s adaptation feels exactly like that—loosely connected highlights from a bigger, better story. This is a movie that offers absolutely nothing—it’s not romantic, dramatic, exciting, or interesting. The only thing it does successfully is waste $60+ million of Warner Bros.’ money.
In an attempt to put glitter on his ass pimple of a script, Goldsman called in favors from all the big stars he’s worked with over the years. Don’t see names like Colin Farrell, Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, William Hurt, and even [CAMEO SPOILER] Will Smith and think that it signifies any kind of quality with the material. Watching this, it’s clear that nobody is connecting with their characters or putting in much of an effort. They’re just doing a solid for Goldsman and/or succumbing to whatever blackmail threat he must have on them.
The Handsome Man’s Bowler Hat Club was serious business.
If it seems like the actors don’t have any clue what’s going on in this movie, it’s because nobody does. Goldsman, being a terrible writer, does his best to make everything as confusing as possible throughout the two hour runtime. I understand that WINTER’S TALE is supposed to be a fantasy, but the filmmaker seems to use this as a crutch to not explain basic plot information or completely ignore things that make zero sense. There are too many examples of this stupidity to mention, so let’s just jump right in.
Things start on a bad note with a completely unnecessary prologue explaining how protagonist Peter Lake’s foreign parents abandoned him in the United States when they aren’t allowed to immigrate to the country. However, they don’t just leave him on Ellis Island. For some reason they decide the best course of action is to steal a model ship, put their infant child in it, and lower the decorative vessel in to the ocean as their barge sails back towards Europe and hope that the baby actually makes it to shore and doesn’t drown. Miraculously, he survives and two decades later becomes Colin Farrell—now a talented thief in 1916 who is on the run after abandoning his gang and seriously pissing off its leader. (He still has Farrell’s Irish accent despite living in America his entire life. Also, Farrell is supposed to be playing a 21 year old.) During his escape, Peter stumbles upon a winged white horse, which a random Native American man tells him is his magic spirit guide. (He also has a random magical black friend helping him out occasionally.)
TRISTAR PICTURES: THE MOVIE would soon be followed by a romantic comedy starring the Columbia Pictures lady.
Peter’s horse, which he names Horse, convinces him to rob one last house, but when he’s caught by the owner’s daughter, she inexplicably invites him in for tea and flirts with him. Her name is Beverly and she is dying of a magical form of tuberculosis that exhibits no symptoms (I don’t think she coughs one time in the movie) but has never kissed a man. She is constantly talking about magic and light and stars and destiny and miracles to the point of annoyance. (Her narration that bookends the film is equally insufferable.) But she’s pretty and after one cup of tea, Peter is head over heels in love with her and saying things like, “Is it possible to love something so completely it can’t die?”
He and his magical stallion fly Beverly to her ritzy country home. At first her father isn’t thrilled, since, you know, his dying daughter met her boyfriend while he was robbing them. However, Peter gains Dad’s trust after he saves their house from exploding in a furnace malfunction. (For some reason, the father is willing to die with his furnace and orphan all his children in this scenario.) So Peter and Beverly spend more time together, going for a walk on a frozen lake. She gets a fever and the ice begins to melt under her feet, so Peter teaches her to control her illness by listing the constellations in the sky (?), which immediately cures her and refreezes the ice. (That’s not how fevers or ice works!) The couple has sex and then she immediately dies…like literally a few seconds after he finishes. Peter remembers her new age nonsense about each person having one miracle inside of them, so he carries Beverly to her magical princess bed and tries to revive her with kisses but it doesn’t work..
Don’t make Russell Crowe sing. You wouldn’t like Russell Crowe when he sings.
Meanwhile, during all this, there’s Russell Crowe. Crowe is the one non-ironically enjoyable part of this movie, chewing scenery as the villain and playing with an accent that changes scene to scene. He stars as Pearly Soames, a demon living on Earth who raised Peter to be his evil protégé and takes it really personally when he decides to leave his life of crime. Luckily, Pearly has magic gems and magic blood that tells him where Peter is. Unluckily, due to demon rules, he’s unable to leave New York City to get him. Thus begins one of the strangest parts of WINTER’S TALE, where Pearly meets with Lucifer himself, played by Will Smith, and actually makes a legal case for why he should be allowed to chase and murder Peter. Smith’s version of the Devil wears two sparkly earrings, reads Stephen Hawking and has a Jimi Hendrix shirt despite the fact that it’s 1916, and much like the actor himself, clearly does not want to be there. He denies Pearly’s appeal, but…hey, it doesn’t matter because Peter returns to the city after Beverly’s death distraught and ready to die. Russell Crowe headbutts him repeatedly until he falls off the Brooklyn Bridge to his demise.
Of course Akiva Goldsman found a way to bring back Will Smith for I AM LEGEND 2.
Just kidding! Peter survives but gets amnesia (of course) and spends the next 100 years wandering around the city, becoming a scruffy homeless-looking man and repeatedly drawing sidewalk art of a girl who looks like Beverly but having no idea who she is. (At least he still has a nice apartment despite having no money or job.) One day in 2014, Peter literally runs in to Jennifer Connelly and her daughter in the park. She decides to help him figure out his life. They take one trip to the library and learn everything about Beverly and her family and the fact that Colin Farrell hasn’t aged a day in 100 years. It also turns out that Jennifer Connelly’s boss at the New York Times just happens to be Beverly’s little sister. Unless I’m missing something, that would make her character around 110 years old. I’m guessing this plot point made more sense in the 1980s, when the book was published and her character would be in her 70s, but Goldsman clearly didn’t bother to care about this movie that much.
Around this time, it’s revealed that Connelly’s daughter Abby has cancer and in a bizarre twist—Peter realizes that the redhead he’s been drawing for a century wasn’t Beverly and her fiery locks, but Abby and her red chemo scarf. Yep, Peter’s one miracle was not to save his beloved Beverly all those years ago, it was to save this random girl from cancer one hundred years later. And apparently Beverly’s dying miracle was to give Peter everlasting life so he could accomplish this. Feel free to bang your head against a wall at how ridiculous and asinine this plot is. I did and it made me feel better.
No one is safe from the Swamp of Sadness is ATREYU: REVENGE OF ARTAX.
There’s one more layer of stupid: Russell Crowe is still around. He’s been waiting for Peter for a century and hates him so much that he signed a pact with The Fresh Prince of Darkness so he can become mortal and kill him himself. This leads to a final showdown at Beverly’s country house where Colin Farrell fistfights a demon for the right to use his miracle to save a girl with cancer. I think that bears repeating: Colin Farrell fistfights a demon for the right to use his miracle to save a girl with cancer. Even more amazing is the part where the magic horse breaks the ice and drowns all of Russell Crowe’s henchmen.
Think about this from Jennifer Connelly’s perspective: She literally runs in to a homeless guy in the park, sees him the next day where she works, discovers he’s 100+ years old and can cure cancer, rides a winged horse off the roof of a skyscraper, fights fallen angels, and witnesses her daughter brought back from the dead. And she’s completely unfazed by any of it! This movie is kind of amazing.
Even in Hell, you’re still my boy, Blue!
Somewhere around the time when Colin Farrell’s magic tears are curing the little girl’s cancer (and luckily Beverly’s same magic princess bed is still around 100 years later), I turned to my wife and said, “I swear to God if this movie ends with Colin Farrell flying his stupid horse in to the stars, I’m going to punch a hole in our TV.”
Akiva Goldsman, you owe me a new television.
The best of Will Smith’s Devil and the movie’s sappy dialogue.
Russell Crowe headbutting and magic horses flying and murdering.
Nada. You might be thinking of Winter’s Tail.
Help Akiva Goldsman continue to fail upwards! Buy this movie here!
Take a shot or drink every time:
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Thanks to Freddy and Leonard for suggesting this week’s movie! And happy 2015 everyone!
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