It comes down to the voiceover. To that fucking voiceover.
For most of its running time, Winter’s Tale is nothing more than a particularly hilarious bit of Hollywood garbage. Released in February to disastrous box office and piddling reviews, the only attention Winter’s Tale received was from bad movie junkies at podcasts like ‘How Did This Get Made?’ and others. Baffling in its woefully incompetent storytelling and hilarious in its hysterically inane notions of romance and magic, Winter’s Tale is the sort of embarrassing disaster that can only result from unchecked hubris, in this case coming from writer-director Akiva “Somehow Still Allowed to Work After Batman & Robin” Goldsman.
Anyone watching Winter’s Tale is advised to bring a nice tall mug of your liquor of choice, the better to cackle through things like horse-wings, demonic Jimi Hendrix t-shirts, Russell Crowe speaking with an Irish accent so thick you’d think a leprechaun punted him in the mouth right before filming, and the sight of Colin Farrell sexing a woman so right she dies right afterwards. Liquor will also help ease the two hour runtime, at least half of which is devoted to extended scenes of poor actors delivering pages of monologues in a (failed) attempt to explain whatever the fuck is happening in the film at that given moment.
So what separates Winter’s Tale from the bad movie pack? What is it about the film that pushes it from a laughable lark to something a good deal more repulsive?
Reading out the plot of the film, it’s hard to imagine something so mindless drawing much of a reaction. Let me summarize as best I can:
So in 1895 there’s this guy Peter Lake (Farrell) and he’s magical and immortal but he doesn’t know either yet, and he’s on the run from his old boss, gang lord Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe), who’s a demon, but nobody really knows about that or cares when they find out, and Pearly wants to kill Peter Lake because Peter Lake is magic and if Peter Lake finds out he’s magic he will use the magic to perform a miracle and demons hate miracles because reasons (and, to reiterate, Peter Lake knows none of this and remains in the dark until the last five fucking minutes of this goddamn movie). Peter runs into a horse that is also an angel and also a dog and they escape together with the help of a black man who is also an angel who is helping Peter for reasons. Meanwhile there’s this rich girl Beverly Penn (Jessica Brown Findlay) who is going to die soon and can see weird lights because of said dying and she’s left home alone when Peter Lake breaks in to rob her house because the horse made him and they meet while she’s in the bath and he has a gun and somehow this is a romance movie now and they’re in love but then Russell Crowe murders a guy and uses his blood to draw sort-of a picture of Beverly and they track her down based on that blood, somehow, so then Peter Lake comes back to rescue her-
(At this point Brendan realizes that he is still in the first act of the movie and screams into the infinite abyss.)
ANYWAY, stuff happens, including sexing-induced fatalities, and then for some fucking reason the movie jumps to present day where Colin Farrell is still alive but has amnesia but then he gets over the amnesia and Jennifer Connelly is there and her daughter is dying but Colin Farrell thinks he can save her because reasons, and Russell Crowe is also there and his accent hasn’t gotten any better and he still wants to stop miracles because reasons and then the horse shows up and grows wings and nobody seems surprised by this and some other stuff happens and then the audience goes home.
Let me assuage some guilt and say some nice things about this movie before digging into the suck: first off, as bone-headed and asinine as this movie is, you can tell that a lot of time, money, and energy was spent in making it. The cinematography by Caleb Deschanel, the sweeping score by Hans Zimmer and Rupert Gregson-Williams, they both give Winter’s Tale a lovely glow, and a feeling that’s unlike most modern films. Had the film worked at all, it would have been exactly the sort of off-kilter oddity that would be prized for years to come, not unlike a masterpiece such as Princess Bride, or even a flawed but spirited film like Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust.
The cast is certainly performing as if they believe they are in that better movie. Colin Farrell and Jessica Brown Findlay are saddled with impossible roles, given the brunt of the aforementioned expositional overloads (Farrell in particular is repeatedly asked to stop dead and explain the plot of the movie directly to the audience). Farrell and Findlay are pros, and they have a lovely chemistry that suggests real sparks that hopefully might be realized in something that isn’t a piece of shit.
And on the opposite side of the spectrum you have Russell Crowe. I won’t go so far as to say his performance here is ‘good’, but he deserves some kind of Nic Cage Participation Trophy for just how hard he commits. While everyone else seems invested in the vision of Winter’s Tale as a timeless love story, Crowe alone seems to have realized exactly what movie he’s in, and he attacks his scenes with refreshing mania.
But all this energy is just so much thin ice over the toxic sludge that is Akiva Goldsman’s script. And, again, it didn’t hit me how ugly and bankrupt the film is until Findlay recited that closing voiceover. Here’s an abridged version:
What if we are all unique, and the universe loves us all equally? So much so that it bends over backwards across the centuries for each and every one of us. And sometimes we are just lucky enough to see it.
No life is more important than another. And nothing has been without purpose. Nothing. What if we are all part of a great pattern that we may someday understand? And one day, when we have done what we alone are capable of doing, we get to rise up and reunite with those we have loved the most, forever embraced. What if we get to become… stars.
I mean… “So much so that it bends over backwards across the centuries for every one of us.”
It doesn’t. The universe does not do that. To look at our world, our world that is ravaged by disease, by death, by gross improprieties of power that have systematically deprived races of human beings their rights for centuries, to look at all that and declare that everything is hunky dory, that magical rainbows and ponies are always right around the corner waiting to deliver us our happy ending, it speaks to an appalling place of arrogance, of privilege, of an utter lack of empathy.
More than one critic has suggested that Goldsman take a tour of a children’s cancer ward before going back to slinging his shit.
The notion of every life having value, of our existence having constant invisible ripples throughout the world, is one of the most poignant and beautiful ideas out there. Films everywhere from It’s a Wonderful Life to Fish Story will continue to inspire people for generations because of just how masterfully they articulate this concept and actualize it into vivid emotional color.
But the key to these films, and to other successful iterations of this thematic core, is that they do not run away from the darkness that appears in our lives. Pop culture may canonize the feel-goodness of Wonderful Life’s ending, but that neglects just how tormented and bleak the other 95% of the film is. Affirming the value of being alive only counts when you are willing to take the good with the bad and understand how one informs the other.
Sticking your fingers in your ears and going “LALALALALALALALA” anytime someone brings up something melancholy or bleak, all that does is stunt your ability to relate to other human beings and to what matters in life. That’s the Winter’s Tale approach. Every problem solves itself. Every misstep gets fixed immediately. There is always a safety net hanging over every choice and action, which means that no choice and no action has any actual meaning.
It speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of how fantasy, of how story works. Fantasy is NOT about escape, no matter how much the tweed-shirted establishment may look down at the genre. Fantasy is not the means by which we escape the world, it is the mechanism through which we can interpret and articulate that reality. The best fantasy is the kind that peers into the depths of the human soul, finds something honest to say, and frames that honesty in a compelling story that nevertheless communicates to an empathetic place inside all of us.
But there’re no human beings in Winter’s Tale, only empty puppets made to flap their mouths while Akiva Goldsman’s bullshit pours out. Winter’s Tale isn’t just a bad, boring movie, it’s a film that spits in the face of everything resonant in the fantasy genre and everything beautiful and self-aware about the human race. It is rancid garbage, prettied up and packaged as a Valentine’s Day present, the equivalent of a chocolate candy with a razor blade in the middle.
And this is the guy they want to write the Dark Tower movies. Christ.