Purely Joyful Movie!

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Jeremy Irons plays Tom Crick, a history teacher that is having trouble getting through to his class. His wife Mary(Sinead Cusack), herself in a battle with depression, feels a disconnect with her husband. Mr. Crick grapples with memories of his childhood days that interferes with his present day activities. In desperation to connect with his students, Crick has himself believing he can grab their interest in history by telling them stories from his young adult life. Most of his stories are of a sexual nature and his tales have nothing to do with history. Crick continues with his erotic revelations and even treats his class to a surreal field trip through his most haunting of memories. When forced into retirement, Tom finds that one of his most stubborn students(Ethan Hawke)finally understands there was a certain call for his flirt on the edge of madness.Young Tom is played by Grant Warnock and young Mary is aptly played by a charming Lena Headey. Very strong sexual situations, nudity and an abortion scene calls for an R rating. My favorite sequence is a version of show me yours, I'll show you mine. I found this drama very sad, but yet very interesting. The switching between past and present is not too distracting and an important method of sustaining the story line. The supporting cast features: David Morrissey, Callum Dixon, John Heard and Pete Postlethwaite. Watch for a brief glimpse of a young Maggie Gyllenhaal. If you happen to be suffering any degree of depression, this may not be the film for you; but I really enjoyed it.

I have not read the novel, but a quick glance at a synopsis of the plot suggests what a mess they've made of it on film. The novel sounds like a serious, intellectual drama. The film is an attempt to simplify the concepts involved, and turn them into a rather straightforward drama. In itself, and no further, this might have succeeded. The failure is caused by other things.The transferral of the Cricks from Greenwich to Pittsburgh is a disastrous mistake - the only reason for doing it was clearly the American box office. Again, the distributors tend to assume that Americans are too stupid to take in a drama set in England. They are wrong.The conversations between Irons (Crick) and John Heard, as American school-teachers discussing education in 1974, are embarrassingly wrong somehow, and bang an entirely wrong beat. The time you first realise Irons is addressing his class of teenagers (Ethan Hawke is 22, actually) as 'children' is even more excruciating. The fact that he apologises for this expression in his farewell speech made me think that one of the script editors had only just noticed how dumb it sounded, and shoved it in as an 'apology' (to the film-goer rather than to the student) at the end.Things get worse. When Irons shows his 'children' a print of the Guillotine and describes, very mildly, some of the mutilated corpses, they all exclaim 'Oh God, no...' and 'Aaargh, how sickening...' They sound more like children from 'Pollyanna', than actual teenagers from Pittsburgh, who'd have grown up under Vietnam, and were just about to see 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.' Nearly every 'American' scene is mind-numbingly awful. Irons's farewell speech is hardly Michael Redgrave (or even Albert Finney) in 'The Browning Version.' Someone had another pointless idea. "When Irons starts talking about his past life, let's have the American teenagers actually transported there on the screen." This makes no sense, and after a while the whole idea seems to have been mercifully abandoned. The scene of them trundling across Norfolk in a truck was risible, and I half-expected Captain Mainwaring and Jones's van to appear at any minute. The assumption behind this 'idea' seems that the film-goer is in reality just as thick as John Heard assumes students are - i.e. no one's interested in history and the past - so our best bet is to actually SHOW Ethan Hawke tramping about in the Fens of WW2.John Heard and Peter Postlethwaite are completely wasted, and David Morrissey does the valiant best he can as Irons's mentally handicapped elder brother. I have always found Jeremy Irons greatly over-rated, and 'Waterland' shows just how insipid his acting can be at times. I was - even within the constrictions of the wreckage made of the Graham Swift novel by the scriptwriters - longing for a Dirk Bogarde or a Christopher Ecclestone. Irons simply doesn't carry it. In fact, the bar room scene with Irons and Ethan Hawke showed how much better Hawke is. I was reminded of Hawke with Robin Williams in 'Dead Poets Society' three years earlier. Even that has tinges of embarrassment (most filmmakers have no real idea what schools or universities are like - watch Lewis Gilbert's hysterical portrayal of a 1980's British university in 'Educating Rita') but 'Dead Poets Society' is great stuff compared to the wet mess of 'Waterland'. (Like most films of this sort, it has lashings of dull 'mood music' - always appearing at the completely wrong moment in the film.)PS Ethan Hawke looks 'pretty.'

This is a dark brooding movie that hooked me the first time I saw it. I've enjoyed watching it a number of times ever since.Jeremy Irons is, as Leonard Matlin indicates in his review, superb in his role. There's a great deal of darkness and certainly some degree of socially deviant behavior in the film. But it's very much the darkness that provides the drama and meaning to the story. It's a beautifully photographed film. I thought Lena Headey was quite good in addition to being stunning. Sinead Cusack and all of the supporting cast were quite good. It is an eccentric film, but I believe it comes through as a very fine piece of film making.It strikes me as being very underrated by the users' ratings. This is probably due in the main to the darkness of the film and its most definite lack of Hollywood style optimism. The lower ratings might also be due to what might be interpreted as a conservative message. I am not a political conservative--God forbid! However, the message that there can be unforeseen and terrible consequences from our actions is something that all of us could well profit from. Very fine movie, but certainly not for those that dislike "the bad taste of things"--or the tragedies of life.

"Waterland" puts Irons at the center as a disturbed history teacher who recounts his personal history to his class. Irons performance is excellent as always. However the story is a plaintive and peculiar reflection on what is a rather drab and uneventful life. Furthermore, the film tells the story of the teacher telling his story with constant flashbacks into which some of his student are magically transported serving more to confuse matters than to entertain. "Waterland" is an excellent shoot with quality in all aspects except the convoluted story which must have been a much better novel than film.