The Winter Guest Movie Review

There is a science fiction short story called It's a Good Life (familiar to many people via the famous Twilight Zone episode with Billy Mumy), which features an impish child with near omnipotent powers, who has isolated his small town such that there is absolutely nothing in any direction from it, just infinite emptiness. According to the story, no one knows whether he removed the town from the universe and located it elsewhere, or simply made the entire rest of the universe disappear such that reality now consists solely of this town.

The amazing, bleak visuals of Alan Rickman's The Winter Guest (from a play by Sharman MacDonald) put me in mind of the utter, unnerving, hopeless isolation of the town in that story. It is set in a small, snow-covered town in Scotland, each edge of the town opening up onto a seemingly endless white expanse of emptiness. Simultaneously forbidding and beautiful.

Some viewers who are used to American English may struggle with some of the Scottish accented dialogue in this movie. I admit I did, and I'm sure it adversely affected my understanding and enjoyment of the film. I probably understood about 75% of the dialogue, though it varied quite a bit from character to character. I understood 95% of what some of the characters said, and more like 50% of what some others said.

It's a "slice of life" style movie, about four pairs of people, with the four threads only minimally touching. One pair consists of a depressed woman (Emma Thompson) and her elderly, annoying but loving mother (played by Thompson's real life mother Phyllida Law), one is two schoolboys playing hooky, one is a young man and his aggressive suitor (a bold, assertive, somewhat tomboyish but beautiful girl--the sort of predator many of us wouldn't mind at all having in our life), and the last is two old women whose hobby is attending funerals (rather like the protagonists in Harold and Maude).

It's the kind of movie where people talk around things, and there's a lot of psychologically complex stuff going on (meaning that missing so much dialogue is even a bigger deal here than with most movies). Some viewers will appreciate its intelligent, thoughtful, mature approach; some will be put off by its slow pace and relentless gloom and dreariness. I'm somewhere in between. I liked that it was a grown up movie, and there were moments here and there that spoke to me, that hit me a little deeper, but I also found it somewhat grueling to sit through. And confusing.

In part because of the language issues, I feel like I missed more of the storyline and the intended symbolism of this movie than I typically do.

Of the four pairs, the kids may have held my interest the least well, though there were worthwhile moments here and there. The young couple also didn't have much of an impact on me, but I think the accents were more of a factor there than in any of the four, and I have the sense there is plenty going on there that I would have found interesting if I had understood more of the dialogue. The old ladies who go to funerals get the least screen time of the four. I liked them, but really their clips are more comic relief, until the end when one of them has something of a breakdown, which is actually quite effective.

The Emma Thompson and her mother pair is the one I got into the most (relatively speaking; really none of the four engaged me in a big way). I was intrigued by that relationship, by the shifting dependencies, the communication that was only intermittently effective, the mother's tartly witty verbal style, the way familiarity and the burdens of their history caused them to push each other's buttons with remarks an outsider likely wouldn't recognize as annoying or offensive. And I liked the warmth that is manifested at the end that you kind of always knew was there.

Some of the mother's lines, and even things about her that are unspoken, convey certain poignant truths about aging that spoke to me. For instance, when she looks in the mirror and remarks that she's still the same person she was when she was 17, that only the externals (which is mostly what people react to) have changed. That very realization occurred to me several years ago, and it's had a big impact on how I see myself and people in general ever since.

This movie occasionally has a bit of the artificiality that filmed plays can suffer from.

This is a film that requires concentration and patience. For me, that concentration and patience resulted in a modest to moderate payoff, but I believe there is more to this movie, and that for other viewers who bring different life experiences, different expectations, different preferences to the table, the payoff may be greater.