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A Will of Their OwnRating:
Release Date: 29 April, 2003 Retail Price: $9.98 OUR Price: $9.98 You SAVE: $0.00! Cast: Complete Cast (11 total) |
A Will of Their Own Reviews
Disappointed
I bought this movie based on the amazon reviews and was very disappointed. The acting was terrible in this movie and I can't tell you how much "DRAMA" was over done in this movie. I would have given this movie 0 stars if possible.
I wanted to like this movie more than I did
I wanted to like this movie/miniseries more than I did. With good viewer feedback and an impressive cast, I was looking forward to watching an engaging story about several generations of women finding their own voice in an often hostile society. Unfortunately, the script for this film was so abysmally bad that even some highly experienced actors couldn't rise above it. Often the film plays like a simplified eighth grade educational drama about the history of women's rights, with a lot of speechifying quite obviously meant more for the film's audience than the individuals speaking to each other.
Despite a running time of 225 minutes, character development is almost non-existent. A Native American boyfriend comes and goes from the story with apparently no emotional effect on the lead character Amanda when she is forced to move across the country from him, presumably forever. A woman is introduced who we are later to assume becomes the Amanda's best friend for years, although we don't know anything about the basis of their friendship. Villains, such as an evil landlord and Amanda's daughter's husband, twirl their mustaches, and Ellen Burstyn struggles with little success to add a more human dimension to Amanda's ever-rigid grandmother. The level of melodrama in the story reaches unintentionally comical proportions in such scenes as an unwed mother and baby being turned out into the cold by a rapacious landlord. Lillian Gish managed to pull off this kind of material, but that was almost 100 years ago in cinematic history, and she had the benefit of having D.W. Griffith as a director.
Most of the acting in A Will of Their Own is very stilted, but I blame that primarily on extremely poor dialogue and character motivation. The best performances came from some actors in small parts: Reiko Aylesworth as the immigrant mother of Amanda, Tovah Feldshuh (I believe) as a motherly Jewish neighbor in Amanda's tenement building, and Emmy Rossum as Amanda's young daughter. All of these actors managed to pull surprising subtlety out of a very poor script. I'm giving the film 2 stars because it did draw me in enough to finish watching it, but this is a sad example of a film that could have been so much more with a better writer and director.
More Customer Reviews (8 total)
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