The wanting never ends…

Movie review:

“Ethan Frome” (1993)

Liam Neeson, Patricia Arquette, Joan Allen

Director: John Madden

1 hr 39 mins

Based on the novel, Ethan Frome (1911), by Edith Wharton.

The breaking of a heart can take so long…

I watched the movie, then I read the book, then I watched the movie again (and again), it’s easier than reading the book again, but I’m going to do that too.

I think the book and the movie are interchangeable. Knowing the ending doesn’t reduce the dreadful intensity of this story that gets ever more sad from beginning to end.

The deeply human love story breaks through the arid shell of real life—oh, so briefly…Ethan (Neeson) wants more, Mattie (Arquette) wants more, the viewer wants more…

Every other character in the story seems to, well, not necessarily “want” less, but to be all too righteously satisfied with less.

Except for a brief whirl of a crowded dance scene, there are no smiles on the faces of any of the other characters who live dried up lives, and disdain the spark of love and life in Ethan and Mattie.

Doubtless, the town folk see a pitiless moral lesson in the damaged life of Ethan Frome and the love he must keep stuffed inside him.

I see a man and a woman who share forbidden love, but don’t know what to do about it, and grotesquely fail to snuff it out.

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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.

Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,

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Book review: The Sea Runners

…it informs, it does not soar…

by Ivan Doig

click here

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