Winter’s Tale
This is a difficult review to write, perhaps impossible, because the very act of saying anything about this movie runs the risk of decreasing your odds of enjoying it as it was meant to be enjoyed.
Even praising it as it merits being praised will ruin it for some; because many a man is disappointed by expectations raised too high. I had no such curse, because I walked into the theater with no notion whatsoever what kind of film it was, or how good or bad, my heart was like snow on which no footprint has fallen, and everything happened just as it was meant to be.
It is as if every movie has a miracle meant for one, only one, who sits in the audience to watch and be carried away. This may be that movie for you. It may be your golden story. It was mine.
It is called WINTER’S TALE.
For everyone there is one story, one precious story, that lives in the heart forever like a golden lamp, the living source of warmth when the imagination is filled with shapes of frost, but also the light in whose gleam all other stories are judged. The golden story is usually encountered in first youth, and never at my age, unless heaven opens a particular gift for you, just for you.
Such movies are rare as gems, as strange and wondrous as white magic, as heartrending as new love.
So, if you are willing to take me on faith, completely on faith, without reading another word, and go out this evening with your best gal and see this film, you will enjoy it more than if you read the rest of this article, where I discuss the film, and try to persuade you to go. It is that rich and that deep and that poignant, and I assure you that if I even tell you what genre this movie is, it will ruin part of the surprise, perhaps a crucial part.
Trust me: I speak in sober judgment. Go now, quickly, to the theater, without even returning first to your house for your coat. You will thank me. I would wager the price of a ticket, and offer to repay any man who takes me at my word and finds himself disappointed, and so remove the element of risk from your decision, but, alas, I am a poor man, and no gambler. But I will risk my word, which is more precious to me.
For those of you who are unconvinced, read on! But the diminution of your pleasure should I persuade you to go is now no longer on my conscience.
There are few, very few, movies that I put on my list of favorites. Akira Kuwisawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI is one, or Richard Donner’s SUPERMAN, or William Goldman’s THE PRINCESS BRIDE, or Miyazaki’s NAUSICAÄ OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND or CYRANO de BERGERAC starring Jose Ferrer. This film now joins that list, and perhaps tops it.
But this film is nothing like those films. It is not like any film I have seen, except, perhaps Frank Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. The only storybook I have every read that tells a story like this is John Crowley’s masterful LITTLE, BIG. Some people call this a fantasy film, or a supernatural romance. I am not sure those labels fit. They are more misleading than rightleading.
G.K. Chesterton was the only practitioner known to me of the art of showing the magic and the fantasy hidden in commonplace objects, or capturing the extraordinary magic behind ordinary life. If MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY had been a love story rather than a detective mystery, it might have been something like this. And G.K. Chesterton is my favorite author, so for any lesser craftsman to be compared to him is the highest praise I know.
The movie opens with a voice-over explaining that every man is born with one miracle, but it belongs to another and not himself, and he must spend the adventure of his life to find that other and give his miracle away.
It is the modern day. We see a man climbing into the hidden workings of the night sky painting on the ceiling of Grand Central Station, and there behind a hidden door he finds a box where there are mementos of another life: a tiny brass plaque bearing the name of a ship, a square of chocolate wrapped in foil, a twig, a blanket…
Next we see New York at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, when the Brooklyn Bridge was new, and emigrant risked life and limb and all to have their children reach the land of freedom. In a few, heartbreaking moments, we see a couple being refused admittance into America, and in desperation place their helpless child in a model ship, and set him adrift in the harbor, sailing beneath toy sails. The child smiles as he is rocked by the waves…
Now we see the same man as we saw in the Twenty-First Century, or perhaps his grandfather, in 1916. It is the cold week between Christmas and New Year’s. His name is Peter Lake (played by Colin Farrell) who is a master thief and second story man, an artist of the craft, involved in a gang run by their demonic boss Pearly Soames (played by Russell Crowe), whose thugs, all wearing dark coats and black bowler hats, are chasing him down the back alleys of the borough, eager for his blood. He jams the lock on a fence, which only slows the pursuit. As he runs, he slips on the ice, just as the first of the thugs clears the fence behind him. It is now too late for him to get away. He raises his eyes, and there, in a corner of the alleyway, is a tall, beautiful, white horse. It bows like a circus trained horse, as if inviting him to mount up…
He does, but finds the magnificent steed carrying him where he does not want to go, toward the thugs and not away. But then the horse, in a simply impossible leap, clears the ten foot fence almost as if it were a winged thing, and not a horse at all…
Meanwhile, the luminously beautiful Jessica Brown Findlay plays Beverly, the daughter of a wealthy publisher Isaac Penn (played by William Hurt). She is dying of consumption, and is not likely to live to see the winter come again. To cool her constant fever, which sometimes gives her hallucinations, which perhaps are visions, she sleeps on a tent on the roof in the December cold.
She explains that at times, when the fever comes, she can see partway into the other world that is behind this world, a world of light, so that the glance of the sunlight on snow through the clear winter air, on the windowpane, on the glass on the desk, the brass lamp on the mantle, the rims of the spectacles, all form a pattern, a webwork, a predestination woven of light…
Her little sister begs her not to die, but she smiles sadly and says that is not for her to say. The family is going upstate, to their home by the lake where, so it is said, all things happen as they are supposed to happen. She will join them the next day.
Peter now plans to leave the city before daybreak, but the horse, which he cannot tame, but which he now follows as his good luck charm, takes him to the yard of a mansion apparently empty. In he breaks, to steal one last treasure trove, and finds Beverly, still wet from a cooling bath, in her night things, playing passionately at the piano.
She turns. Their eyes meet. Of course, a girl who knows she is fated soon to die is unafraid merely of a handsome thief.
“He could say nothing. He had no right to be there, he had already been profoundly changed, he was not good at small talk, she was half naked, it was dawn, and he loved her.”
Things go pretty much as one might expect in a love story starring a lovely girl who is like to die within the year, and who has never been kissed on the lips, and a handsome young Irish rogue with a tall white horse out of legend, if not out of heaven….
Except that the gangland boss, Pearly Soames, now has a vision of a miracle he is fated to see stillborn, and so he goes to visit one who dwells in the darkness beneath a bridge, to ask permission to leave the city. And that one is the devil…
He seeks out the girl to destroy her and prevent the miracle of Peter. And the forces of darkness and light must meet…
As I watched this film, I kept saying to myself this is surely the best film ever. And each time I said this, I said again to myself: but surely that is a cliché, or surely I have seen that before. But I had never seen anything like it before, not done right.
I have seen any number of romances, or fantasies, or fantastic romances, but this was like none of these because it took all of them and placed them, like a blue diamond against black velvet, for the first time in the proper setting. This is a story about the world itself, and not just the world we see. This is a story about justice, but not human justice: each gets what he deserves, but not in this life.
That is enough, or perhaps too much. If you do not sense in ways I cannot tell what is hidden behind my words, putting them more boldly would be self defeating. One cannot draw a many-colored shadow shining from a stained glass window out of the chapel door and into the brighter sunlight for close examination.
But entering into this movie was like entering a chapel, a masterpiece of medieval art which contains not only grotesque and twisted gargoyles but images of soaring beauty, and sorrow and justice as stern as an angel, and joy as sharp as a two edged sword.
I have heard the rumor that this film bombed at the box office, and that critics maligned it and the public yawned. I cannot fathom such things, cannot believe the rumor true. One does not need to be a particular fan of film of one genre or another, or a particular partisan of one outlook or another, to enjoy this film. One need be only human.
And by only human, of course, I mean that work of divine art, half beast and half angel placed by the universe in this one special and unique place and time to work your miracle on the life that will be duller and emptier without it.
Be brave, my fellow humans, my fellow beasts and angels.
Tales exist to remind you of your path down life’s river, and even more rare are tales that tell of the sea into which all life pours, something wider than life with no far shore; and some tales are bright as love and sad as death, and few, very much fewer, promise that even those tears are wiped away.
WINTERS TALE is that tale.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
