 "Platonic Passion" | 2009-05-07 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3EBHHCZO6V2A4 |
"Carrington" is an excellent period movie starring Jonathan Pryce as Bloomsbury author Lytton Strachey and the luminous Emma Thompson as the painter Dora Carrington. The lifelong friendship of Strachey and Carrington was at once passionate and complicated. Lytton is smitten with Dora at first sight, thinking she's a boy. Soon, the boyish Dora and the effeminate Lytton are kissing passionately, sharing the same bed--yet never consummating it. Dora is as close as Lytton ever gets to heterosexuality, even on his deathbed, he says he wanted to marry her. They were soulmates.
"Carrington" shows Dora's numerous lovers,from the troubled artist Mark (Rufus Sewell), to the manly Rafe (Steven Waddington),who sleeps with both Dora and Lytton, to Gerald, and then the handsome,hunky sailor Beacus (Jeremy Northam). Lytton and Dora have a bond that many straight women and gay men have--they see things in a similar way. There's a deep understanding.
"Carrington" is melancholy, especially with the music of Michael Nyman. The final scenes are wrenching, between Lytton's final illness and death, and Dora's suicide. "Carrington" is an excellent, powerful period piece. |
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| "True love is more intimate than sex" | 2009-04-06 |
| - Reviewed By moongirl527 |
"Carrington" portrays a love story between artist Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey. It is more than platonic, yet distinctively one without sexual intercourse. Lytton is openly gay, yet is unable to deny how deeply he loves Carrington. Carrington is in love with Lytton in an almost obsessive capacity, confessing her love to him while he does nothing to dissuade her. In fact, his heart is obviously hers, despite his inability to desire her in a sexual way. While they do share intimate embraces and kiss in the movie, never do they fully consummate their unique relationship. Carrington embarks on numerous sexual affairs, marries one man (a young officer) who she "shares" with Lytton, and lives in torment that the only man she wants can love her in every way BUT a sexual way. As in real life, Carrington and Lytton end up living together. A poignant scene is when a sick and delirious Lytton calls out to Carrington, who's at his bedside. He expresses his love and regret that he never married her, indicating his romantic love for her despite lack of physical desire for her body.
Jonathan Pryce is phenomenal in this movie as Lytton Strachey. Behind the beard and the soft voice, one could hardly recognize him as the same man who played the villain in "What A Girl Wants." Emma Thompson is endearing as a woman so in love with a man she is willing to bear a lot. Both actors are extraordinary in this film and give stand-out performances, leaving the supporting actors far behind them. |
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| "Unorthodox Love Story" | 2009-03-30 |
| - Reviewed By User: AC9DUUKX5DXVG |
This is a very unorthodox love story about an attachment between two people that was as open as it was deep. It raises questions about the nature of love, without answering them.
I like it because Lytton Strachey was a fascinating character, here played superbly by Jonathan Pryce. I like it because Emma Thompson plays Carrington. I like it because it is about Bloomsbury, an extended group of creative deviants who lived in interesting times and places. I like it because it is about love unto death conquering formidable obstacles--if love is what it was. Or was it dependence? You decide.
Anyway, this is a true story about real people. It sticks to the facts and lets you draw your own conclusions. Not recommended for prudes or moralists. |
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| "Truly, Madly, Deeply" | 2008-10-16 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1U3TKZ1S6B4L3 |
If you've ever been in love with someone, who, for whatever reason can't absolutely return your feelings, you will sympathize with Emma Thompson as Carrington. Both delicately and passionately told, the love between Dora and Lytton Strachey is told in sections, titled with the names of other lovers and the houses they all live in. Although the subject matter includes pre-and extra-marital affairs as well as early twentieth-century British homosexuality (much different than American), this film has a sweet innocence to it that is entirely due to both Emma Thompson and Jonathan Pryce.
It's not for every Emma Thompson fan, but it is a wonderful movie about love. |
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 "Painful" | 2008-10-14 |
| - Reviewed By User: A2EXEDS3MHMSYG |
| My aunt made me watch this horrible movie during a visit. It may have caused permanent brain damage. At the movie's midpoint I declared, "I hope everyone dies tragic, pain filled deaths". One of the only good things about this movie is that my wish was granted. |
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 "Adrift in a French farce without a sense of humor" | 2007-09-03 |
| - Reviewed By larryc94110 |
This film, "Carrington," displays just about all the virtues and faults of the Merchant-Ivory/Masterpiece Theater genre. It is very earnest, very well acted and very pretty to look upon. It's sometimes quite intelligent. It is also very self-satisfied, very slow and very lacking in humor. It's sometimes very dull, too.
The virtues are just that, virtues. Cumulatively, they build up a lot of credit for this film. The faults, depending on a viewer's personal values, may be regarded as lying somewhere on a scale ranging from irrelevant to fatal. I lean to one extreme. My wife leans to the other.
It might even be argued that the self-satisfaction, the humorlessness are neither more nor less than accurate depictions of Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey and that whole self-absorbed, sexually-perplexed, navel-gazing crowd of twits at Bloomsbury.
I prefer to regard the director-writer, the actors and the whole production as hopelessly gullible in taking their real life protagonists at their own value. The Woolfs, the Bells, Strachey and Carrington herself would, if given half a chance, express themselves as characters in a drama of high-flown aspirations and tragic consequences. I, on the other hand, tend to view them as puppets in a French farce, albeit one written by D. H. Lawrence.
This film, its settings, its characters and its mind-set bear only the most tenuous connection with the real, tangible world. As W.S. Gilbert might have put it, the film and all those in it yearn for Elysian fields, but ignore the fact that they "can't get'em and would only let'em out on building leases" if they had'em. "Carrington" would be well served by the presence of just such a character as Fitzgerald threw in to add a spice of reality to the slow-simmering gumbo of Gatsby and Daisy and Tom: Nick, the narrator, doubter and conscience--a pallid character, yes, but still a whiff of the tax paying, traffic light-bound workaday world.
As a film, "Carrington" is easy on the eye. Its story is interesting enough, although I can't imagine being drawn back to watch it of my own volition again at any time in the foreseeable future. But even as I question the worth of making the film, I can't deny the high level of skill lavished on it.
I think "Carrington" is a film worth seeing--once. That's good enough for four stars as far as I'm concerned. |
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