Film Review
By Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
Ethan Frome
Directed by John Madden
Buena Vista Home Entertainment 03/93 DVD/VHS Feature Film
PG - thematic elements
When a young minister (Tate Donovan) arrives in a turn-of-the-century New England town, he is taken aback by the tight-lipped rural community's chilly treatment of Ethan Frome (Liam Neeson), a poor, lame farmer. The minister's landlady tells him the startling story of this man whose spirit and body have both been broken.
Following the death of his mother, Ethan marries Zeena (Joan Allen), a cousin who had served as a caretaker for them. She's a cold and ill-tempered woman who develops into a full-fledged hypochondriac. Unable to handle chores, Zeena takes in her orphaned cousin Mattie (Patricia Arquette) as a housekeeper. This charming and vibrant young woman soon becomes Zeena's doormat.
Although both Mattie and the emotionally remote Ethan lack the words to describe their attraction to one another, they have an opportunity to be together alone when Zeena visits a doctor in another town. Like two flowers who have never had the chance to bloom, they express their love. However, when Zeena discovers what has happened she sets in motion an event which will leave them all trapped together in mutual misery.
Edith Wharton wrote Ethan Frome in 1911 and it remains one of her most popular novels. John Madden has perfectly cast this stark drama which unfolds from a spare screenplay by Richard Nelson. Shot in Vermont, the harsh rural landscape comes across as another character in the story.
On one level, Ethan Frome can be interpreted as an adult fairy tale where the wicked witch wins and the lovers do not live happily ever after. On a more serious level, as literary critic Lionel Trilling has suggested, the story examines what happens to individuals who are hobbled by "the morality of inertia." The lovers lack both the courage and the conviction to forge a new life for themselves, thanks to their subservience to community standards. Their fear dooms them to the routine, death-in-life existence that they so desperately yearned to transcend. The real moral of Ethan Frome is — follow the imperatives of your heart or risk losing your soul.
3 comments:
Tyler Knarr
Brother Peach
English 320
March 26, 2007
For those of you who enjoy long elevator rides with an ex-girlfriend who you havn’t talked to in years and long pauses of silence in conversations with your boss at work this is the movie for you. But, if your like the rest of us and would rather not endure several hours of awkward moments and painfully uncomfortable social situations this is not the movie you’d want to spend your Saturday evening watching. We’re all aware we don’t like those discomfited moments in our life so why would we want to watch a movie that is basically compiled scenes of two adult lovers in an oh so cliché forbidden love relationship.
Ethan Frome is written in a flashback style told between several different narrators that leaves you with a sense of uncertainty about the validity of the story, and how true each event it. Ethan Frome is the main character in the story and is married to a very sickly older woman by the name of Zeena Frome. They find they need help around the house and employ Zeena’s distant relative Mattie Silver. Who when she comes is initially like Zeena and sickly but once spring rolls around it heals her of her illness and she becomes a vibrant, energetic young woman. Ethan begins to find himself entranced by the youthful beauty of this young Mattie silver (like so many movies before this of forbidden love) and starts to fall into the temptation of adultery.
The attraction to Mattie apparently becomes apparent later in the film when Mattie shows him she returns this forbidden love. Zeena begins to become suspicious of her husband and her housekeeper and arranges to hire a woman to work for them and send Mattie away. Ethan, against Zeenas wishes, says he’ll take Mattie to the train station for her departure. On the way they decide to go sledding as one last display of their affection for eachother. This point in the movie which I guess you could consider the climax of the movie was not exactly climactic. After several sledding excursions down the hill they find themselves looking for away from the treacherous waters of separation and go on a seemingly “suicidal sleigh ride.” They end up crashing into a tree and fail to kill themselves (Wow, who would have guessed that riding a sleigh into a tree would be a bad way to commit suicide) but, both are maimed and crippled for life. The story takes a drastic twist of irony that ends with sickly Zeena having to care for Mattie and Ethan. All in all a very uneventful story, with painful awkward acting, and a very unoriginal plot.
This movie contained many attempts at literary schemes such as foreshadowing and symbolism but was merely mediocre in its success. The director attempted to have a moaning fox parallel the struggle that Mattie and Ethan were enduring but I found the foxes cries not loud enough to gain any sympathy from me. It just didn’t have any plot significance in the story at all. The affect of the flashback style of telling the story made the uncertainty of the plot more difficult to deal with. Although I am certain that if the story was inaccurate the actual events could not have been more boring. I would have recommended the author to write as if someone a little more knowing in the story to gain more insight in the characters. Watching the movie I felt like I was Ethan in a scene in which he was watching the town have a party in a hall through a window and was just secluded from the people. I felt like I knew nothing about the characters and was at no point forced to make any real personal connections or “relationships” with the characters.
Ethan Frome reminded me far to much of a soap opera minus any of the somewhat entertaining drama. I found myself wishing I had never spent the time to watching the movie and gained nothing that would better my life from it. I found myself sympathizing with the actors not because of the predicament they found themselves in within the movie, but because of the predicament of them having to act in such a painfully boring movie. If you couldn’t guess from my highly positive review I would not recommend this movie to anyone who has any desire to be entertained.
Dennis Mizzoni
Bro. Rob K. Peach
Eng. Amer. Lit, Per. 3
March 26, 2007
Film Review:
Ethan Frome
Ethan Frome is a riveting novel about the seclusion and seemingly awkward behavior of a certain Ethan Frome, hence the title. The adaptation from novel to film is surprisingly well done, even though some of the film did not directly correspond with the events in the novel. The setting is dank, lonely, and secluded; it expresses and explains the overall strangeness of most of the people in the town.
Ethan Frome himself is portrayed very well. His seclusion from the townspeople and his fidelity towards Mattie Silver is executed flawlessly by the Liam Neeson. Certain scenes during the movie show Ethan’s seclusion. One in particular is the scene near the beginning where he is staring in on a warm and joyous room full of happy townspeople laughing and dancing. The warmth of the room contrasts directly with the coldness of the outside and with the loneliness of Ethan. When the dance is over he finds Mattie Silver and his attitude instantly changes from lonely and sad to happy and he is comforted by Mattie’s presence alone. The connection between Mattie and Ethan is very prevalent in both the novel and the film. Their happiness together is a testament to how in love they really are. Although, this brings to mind the complete and utter discomfort that Zeena brings anywhere she goes. Whenever her name comes up between Mattie and Ethan they are almost instantly snapped into a fright brought on by Zeena’s overbearing and overall annoying personality.
The scene with the pickle dish is really important because it shows that Ethan has a broken life that cannot be pieced together. However, the plate was only broken when Zeena was mentioned, so this is an indication that without Zeena, Ethan’s life would be together and happy. The fact that film made the cat break the dish rather than Mattie is a seemingly slight detail, but when further examined, it actually takes away from Mattie’s dismay. The idea that the cat can be blamed makes it seem more on Mattie’s shoulders because she did not confess to bringing out the dish immediately.
One element of continuity throughout the whole film was the kitchen. The kitchen was always much brighter with the addition of Mattie Silver and the subtraction of Zeena Frome. Mattie brought a sense of pride and happiness the bleak nothingness that was the Frome’s kitchen. Scenes in the movie where Mattie’s cooking is flawed and she is fumbling with the utensils are seen only when Zeena is present. The woman is an ongoing form of unhappiness, she is the thorn in both Mattie’s and Ethan’s paw throughout the whole film.
Some parts of the movie in which the director seemed to have overdone it were some of the characters’ personal storylines. Mattie Silver in particular was portrayed as a sickly girl who blossomed into a beautiful girl who was joyous but still timid. The novel seems to focus less on the sickness and weakness of Mattie and more on her ability to be outgoing among the townspeople of whom she barely knew when she came to the town. The film does not incorporate Mattie’s confidence contrasting with Ethan’s loneliness and low self-esteem. Also, pertaining to Mattie Silver, the fox element was added by the director. This was a nice embellishment on the director’s behalf because the howling of the fox and the moaning of Mattie was a great example of inversion.
Overall, Ethan Frome was a nice adaptation of the novel. The acting was awkward and bleak just as the town of Starkville was meant to be. The protagonist’s struggle was embellished but well carried out. The other characters stayed mostly true to their roots in the novel and expressed what seemed to be the same ideas and expressions of their characters in the book. And finally, the plot stayed generally the same and had an ending that paralleled with the ending of the novel close enough. Overall, I give Ethan Frome a 4 out of 5.
Joe Rizzo
Bro. Peach
English, Period 2
3/26/2007
The movie adaptation of the book Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton, is boring to say the very least. For those of you who are not into classic romance, this movie is defiantly not for you, and anyone who is might still find it annoying. Some might think me a biased and narrow-minded, and maybe it is, but surely there are others out there who agree. From the uninteresting story to the average filming this movie is a spectacular flop, and it is a waste of an hour and forty minutes for anyone who decides to watch it.
A bad book usually doesn’t make a great movie, and this movie doesn’t even reach “good”. From random lines like “It’s not your fault, I should have given the cat some more donut,” to people crashing at the top of hills sledding; this movie stretches the boundaries of suck. How a film this bad could even make it past the beginning phase of production is beyond human comprehension. 1993 must have been a very slow year in the film industry for anyone to seriously consider developing this flop, and why would the theaters even play it. Hopefully it wasn’t translated into any other languages, because if it was it’s understandable that other countries hate America.
The plot is slow and unexciting, and it can also be hard to follow throughout the movie. The author uses random events to try and increase tension, but only ends up increasing the reader’s frustration.
The cast of character are dismal and uninteresting. They are cold and hard to identify with in the different parts of the story. At many times their decisions don’t make sense, and several of them are just generally irritating. The relationship between Ethan and his wife is stressed and there is a lot of tension involved. It’s almost painful to watch and not in the way that a director would want. Adding to all that at certain points it is hard to even understand what the different characters are saying because of a mixture of bad acting and the horrible dialect used in the story.
A bright point in the entire mess is Liam Neeson who at least makes the movie bearable and his faked limp is astounding. However the role does not portray his best acting abilities, and he did the best he could with such a bad role. The other actors in the movie are not found in many other acting roles, perhaps for good reason, with the exception on Neeson, Tate Donovan, and Joan Allen. Joan Allen did a fair job with her role as well; making a character that the watcher hates but understands although maybe not on a personal level. The director is also fairly unknown with only a handful of other films that had only small success. He is currently working on a new film Killshot that will be release in late 2007.
Ethan Frome is a waste of time, money, and effort with either a low production quality or horrible filming. It is truly a flop in every sense of the word. After all that has been said if you are one for sappy dramas that end on a bad note then this movie is for you. Although I suggest that you read the book instead as it is a little easier to finish without giving up. Hopefully John Madden’s carrier has a brighter point then this.
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