The Winter Guest . Gambit Weekly . 07-20-98

The Winter Guest

DIRECTED BY: Alan Rickman

REVIEWED: 07-20-98

Alan Rickman's cinematic adaptation of Sharman MacDonald's play is set in a Scottish seaside town on a day so cold even the sea has frozen. This backdrop is perfect for wintry themes about love and death. Two elderly women (Sheila Reid and Sandra Voe) attend a funeral and confront their own mortality. Two young boys (Sean Biggerstaff and Douglas Murphy) cut school, hide out on a freezing beach and confess their fears. Two teenagers (Gary Hollywood and Arlene Cockburn) explore their adolescent sexuality. And most important, an aging mother (Phyllida Law) and her middle-age daughter (Emma Thompson) spend a day together wrestling with a lifetime's worth of issues about love, loyalty and the need for independence.

The filmmakers would have been better advised to have concentrated on the mother/daughter scenes alone. The picture is over-long and far too leisurely paced. The interactions of the other three pairs ring true enough but develop little momentum. But Law and Thompson (mother/daughter in real life, too) make this film worth seeing. They give magnificent, nuanced performances that speak wonders about the complications of loving and being loved.

--Rick Barton

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The Winter Guest
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The Winter Guest

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The Winter Guest

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