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The Whole Wide WorldRating:
Release Date: 29 July, 2003 Retail Price: $19.94 OUR Price: $17.99 You SAVE: $1.95! Cast: Complete Cast (5 total) |
The Whole Wide World Reviews
Hearts and Souls
Have you ever seen shows about people who go to a garage sale and find something they like that may be something perhaps not worth much, but they bought it because they liked it? Then they come to find out that it wasn't junk, in fact it's worth a lot of money.
Watching The Whole Wide World for the first time was exactly that. It didn't look like much, but we gave it a shot. We took it home. To find out, not that it was worth a lot in money, but worth a lot in our hearts. My husband and I sat to watch this movie together. When it finished we knew how much we were moved. It's not this lovey dovey sappy love story, but rather a real life story of love. It has all of its twists and turns. It has all of its share of heart break. But that is love. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
The movie was not one we ever heard about played in the movie theatre. We know the actors now. It's a movie made on low budget. It's story and the way it's portrayed is beautiful. Just to prove that a good movie or a good story don't require millions of dollars.
Robert E. Howard was an intelligent man and a creative man. You would have to be creative to write Conan, but he was plagued as many artists can be. The acting to portray his inner struggle I felt was done brilliantly. It was not overly acted, it was done just enough to get the point across. Novalyne Price was perhaps what is considered a feminist this day in age, but she was more than that. She was strong. And she finally fulfilled her dream of writing by telling her story with Bob.
I am moved beyond words at this story. To the person, the only person, to write a bad review here on Amazon, I say, you obviously wanted Hollywood and all it's glory to tell the story. You needed more entertainment, perhaps you'd better stick to reading the works of Robert E. Howard only because this movie was not meant for you. For the rest of us who have been lucky to have seen it and enjoy it, we did because it touched our hearts and souls.
Off to read the book now One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price.
A glimpse at a tragic figure Shakespeare would have approved
As I write this review, I am once again glancing surreptitiously at that stack of read novels sitting on my desk, demanding that I review them. I will, I will, I tell them. Just let me do this one review first, and then I'll get back to you guys. But what these other novels don't know, and what I won't tell them, is that I am actually combining two reviews in one.
One day a few years ago I took a ride over to George R.R. Martin's Web site--love the man's work--where he has a page devoted to the pulp fiction author of Conan, the Barbarian stories, Robert E. Howard. Yeah. I have been a Conan-slash-Robert E. Howard fan since I was seven years old, ever since the day my step-dad brought me an original script from the set of the TV series Thriller, which was taping a screen adaptation of Howard's short story entitled Pigeons from Hell. (My stepfather was a Hollywood set designer who got to work a couple of times on the show. Fun job!)
I grabbed the thing up and disappeared in my bedroom, where I read the entire adaptation in a single sitting. It scared me half to death. When I was done reading I looked at the original creator's name, and swore an oath of allegiance right-then-and-there, which brings me back to the subject of this review, and George R. R. Martin.
Mr. Martin suggested that those of us who love reading Howard's works might also enjoy watching a movie about him called The Whole Wide World, starring Rene Zellweger and Vincent D'Onofrio. Mr. Martin then suggested we read the semi-biography from which the movie was adapted, a book entitled One Who Walked Alone, written by Novalyne Price Ellis. Well, I did just that: I got on Amazon and ordered both the DVD, and the book. I was not disappointed.
Novalyne Price Ellis, bless her heart, never wrote another book. Her autobiographical account of her relationship with Howard was her sole attempt at professional writing, to my knowledge, and, as Mr. Martin wrote on his Web site, this is a loss for the rest of us readers because had she devoted herself to the craft, she would have most likely become a very good writer. As it stands, the book is fascinating reading, and allows us a quick glance at some of Robert E. Howard's personality dynamics, made all the more interesting in view of his committing suicide at the age of thirty-one.
A while back I reviewed an excellent novel entitled The Ghost Writer, and commented briefly on the relationship dynamics between the protagonist and his mother, focusing on the main character's failure to separate from his mother during the rapprochement phase of infant development, thereby rendering him incapable of discovering his autonomous identity separate from that of his mother's. This failure to separate is a dysfunctional behavioral dynamic between both mother and child that sometimes sets the foundation for what is called the borderline personality disorder, a condition wherein the personality is bereft of an autonomous ego and must instead bond in an unhealthy way with others to form a counterfeit ego of his own, thereby establishing a sense of "existence" that he would otherwise not be able to experience without the host ego. Moreover, this dysfunctional internal self structure is tragically deficient living in constant terror of impending annihilation should it lose this auxiliary ego.
This was the stage for Novalyne's failed relationship with Howard, though not because of any dynamics on her part, but rather because she was a very practical girl who sensed something remiss in Howard's character. Novalyne loved Howard as a friend, but her sound instincts intuitively restrained her from making a deeper commitment.
I had read when I was in my twenties that Howard killed himself at a very young age, but I never read how or why. This book clued me in, at once revealing to me his paranoid dynamics, and his tragic inability to form a real relationship with anyone other than his mother; and here the relationship cannot be described as anything but dysfunctional and co-dependent, a relationship in which two people shared but a single false ego between them. Howard's fictive character Conan was, in a sense, an extension of his counterfeit ego, living out a life he could only long for, but never actualize.
The Whole Wide World came and went where the box office scene was concerned. For all I know the movie went directly from production to video. And though Zellweger and D'Onofrio are both fine actors, their performances here are somewhat forced, leaving a certain something lacking in the story. This being said, what is remarkable about the film is how it follows the book so closely, and creates for the audience the time and place of Howard's tragic life, through sets, costumes, and props. If you are a fan of the man, read the book, and be sure to rent the video, if you can find a store that has it. I couldn't, which is why I own the DVD.
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