Like a Saturday Night Live skit spun out of control and barely keeping itself together, this impossibly imbecilic film somehow prevails to its end shot, stellar cast in tow. Since A Winter’ s Tale professes to be a serious film, this is something of a feat.
Russell Crowe, Colin Farrell, Jennifer Connelly, Will Smith and William Hurt don’t exactly wink their way through a morass of a muddled script, but if you look closely enough, you might perceive a puffy and glowering Crowe slyly acknowledging he has no idea what the hell is happening here. His evil character, spanning a century of chasing his protege-gone-rogue Farrell, holds court a couple of times with a nondescript Will Smith as none other than Lucifer himself (is there anything duller than a dull devil?)
Farrell, a mere mortal, has no business finding himself suddenly in present-day New York not aged whatsoever after a bad time of it back in 1915. Despite a serious case of amnesia, he somehow finds his way to Eva Marie Saint in 2014, after encountering her as a young girl in 1915. The film makes no attempt to account for its bad math, since that would make her around 110 years old. The talented Saint, who is 89 and old enough to have starred in the 1954 classic On The Waterfront, doesn’t look a day over 80.
Would that a math error were A Winter’s Tale’s biggest problem. A movie that promotes romance, second chances, and miracles, could hardly be more staid, nonsensical, and arbitrary. This is somewhat surprising coming from veteran screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman, who has A Beautiful Mind among his credits. Based on a fairly highly regarded 1983 novel by Mark Helprin, the film might very well sufffer from Cloud Atlas Syndrome: the novel that’s impossible to adapt to film that sorrily gets filmed anyway.
Some films have sticky points and some are just plain stuck. A super-serious yet lackadaisical William Hurt guards his eager yet consumptive daughter (a requisitely beautiful Jessica Brown Findlay of Downton Abbey fame) like a hawk, yet sneaks in a lame joke that tries to rhyme filet with claret. A white horse keeps appearing and it’s not because The Ringling Brothers Circus is in town. The horse is just called “Horse” by the unimaginative Farrell. This gives a proper indication of Farrell’s character’s depth through through the rest of the film. It’s a shame “Horse” also flies at will, which prolongs the movie since Crowe has Farrell cornered numerous times, only to have “Horse” fly him to safety. I felt equally stymied in my seat at the screening with no metaphorical white horse available to get me out of this film any sooner than its laborious two hours-and-nine minutes running time.