‘Is it possible to love someone so completely they simply can’t die?’
Err, no.
First of all, this film is not A Winter’s Tale transposed to modern day New York. If you’re hoping for the Sicilia of Leontes and Hermione to come alive in Little Italy over copious cups of espresso you’ll be disappointed. Back in Shakespeare’s day a winter’s tale was a title given to stories told to pass the time on long winter evenings. They were fantastical, not entirely credible and sometimes completely implausible – so there is a link to the film after all.
‘This is not a true story, it’s a love story’, says the strap line, so I was already going hmmm before the movie started. Surely only the most hard-bitten of misanthropists would say that those two options were mutually exclusive. Set in a mythic New York City this is a story of miracles, crossed destinies, and the age-old battle between good and evil. But the film also contains a love story that spans a century. Colin Farrell plays Peter Lake, who after a Moses-esque beginning to his life in America becomes a thief. He falls for Beverly Penn, played by Jessica Brown Findlay – as seen in Downton Abbey – who is dying of consumption. If that wasn’t sad enough, Lake is being chased by Russell Crowe’s scarfaced Pearly Soames. We skip between time periods – 1895, 1916 and 2014 all getting a look in.
Rather than W. Shakespeare adapting the work of Robert Greene, A New York Winter’s Tale is adapted by Akiva Goldsmith (writer of A Beautiful Mind), based on the novel by Mark Helprin. By all accounts the 1980s book is a best-seller, but the film is not going to emulate that success. An 800 page novel will always be difficult to bring to the screen and it appears Martin Scorsese has previously deemed it impossible to film. Goldsman has gone where the master feared to tread and distilled from the novel ‘what resonated with [him] the most’. This is his debut as director.
Within a few moments of the start of the film it becomes clear that this is definitely a fairytale. Chased through time by his nemesis Soames, for reasons that are either unclear or I missed, Lake escapes on a white horse. Handy to find a horse in New York just when you need it, but even more handy to find a horse with wings which can fly you to safety. From the opening voice-over proposing a non-scientific explanation of the origin of stars we are in the realms of nonsensical magical-realism.
Visually the film is attractive, with the lighting designed to play a key role. Beverly’s scenes are luminous and ethereal, those of Soames much darker. Much research went into the visuals, with inspiration coming from amongst other things, Victorian Orientalist paintings and the clothes of dandy Diamond Jim Brady.
Director Goldsman says that ‘the story blends a reality-based environment with the unexplained that exists behind the world we are.’ I certainly got the sense of the unexplained. Winged horses, a plot that skips between three historical periods, a Will Smith cameo. Maybe I fell asleep at the vital moment when everything was explained, but to me A New York Winter’s Tale didn’t make any sense.
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