Best movie of this year hands down!

Really Surprised!

Overrated

best movie i've ever seen.

I've rarely watched a movie that has had such a negative effect on my enjoyment of it in the last five minutes as this one did. Everything else about this was an absolute delight to me. I thought Lucy and George were cast perfectly and the actors played them with beautiful subtlety of emotion. The scenes of Italy were visually gorgeous. Thoroughly enjoyable until an utterly stupefying ending that was as unnecessary as it was nonsensical. You could literally cut out the last five minutes or so of the movie after the two lovers have gone to sleep in their hotel room and everything makes intuitive and emotional sense. For me It achieved with natural grace what too many movies only contrive to, yet instead of fading to the credits they tack on an ill fitting ending scenario that wearily negates everything that has happened in a way that is neither believable or logical. Did they change directors at the last minute? Was he just having a bad day on that shoot? I guess I'll never know. Perhaps a recut? It would be an easy one to do; snip off a little bit at the end from an otherwise great film and re-release it the way it should be.

James Ivory's screen version of "A Room with a View" has always been one of my favourite films, (I'm a hopeless romantic; now I'm out of the closet), so I approached this television version with some trepidation and for the first twenty minutes or so I was sure I was right; they should leave well enough alone. But then the power of the original novel began to exert itself. And so did the casting. I was never that happy with Helena Bonham-Carter and Julian Sands as the young lovers in the Ivory version, (she simpered; he was gorgeous in a big, dumb hunk kind of way but Sands was also a shade too upper-crust for a working class lad). Here Elaine Cassidy caught the rebellious spirit of Lucy from the off while Rafe Spall seemed to me to be authentically working-class while his real-life father Timothy was simply magnificent in the role of his screen father, Mr Emerson. Laurence Fox, too, was far more recognizably human and less of a caricature than Daniel Day-Lewis as Cecil Vyse. Best of all, in the crucial role of Miss Barlett, Sophie Thompson succeeded in banishing all memories of Maggie Smith and made the part her own. Thompson could now write an encyclopedic textbook on how to play nervous embarrassment. So the casting worked and the first hurdle of replicating a beloved original was overcome.But there were three other crucial differences between this version and Ivory's. Firstly the story is told in flashback as Lucy returns to Florence on her own in 1922. Why is she alone? The clue, of course, is in the year and the ending makes explicit what we may have already guessed. Secondly there is a coda, very nicely done, that seems to set out a happy future for her and thirdly, perhaps you may think unnecessarily, scriptwriter Andrew Davies introduces a sub-text that implies that both Cecil and Mr Beebe, the kindly, match-making vicar played camply by Simon Callow in the Ivory version and by Mark Williams in a much more restrained way here, are gay. Blink and you may well miss the inference and may wonder exactly what Mr Beebe is referring to when later he says that Cecil is not the marrying kind. It is, of course, only one reading into the behaviour of both these characters but it certainly goes some way to explaining the character of Beebe, if not always Cecil. And it ensures that this adaptation is not simply a slavish copy of the James Ivory version.Did I prefer it to Ivory's version? Well, not exactly but it held me in its velvet glove of a grip right to the end and finally it moved in a really quite unexpected fashion.

I see that Elaine Cassidy has been tipped for the top. Her Lucy Honeychurch catches some of what Helena Bonham Carter missed in the Merchant Ivory film, without succeeding in eclipsing her. The main improvement is that she and a surprisingly unfoppish Laurence Fox look like a more realistic pair of lovers in this Andrew Davies adaptation than HBC and DDL and seem fated for different reasons. I wasn't quite so immediately convinced Rafe Spall had what it took to part them.Sophie Thompson never disappoints and is a fabulous Charlotte, Mark Williams turns in another great piece of work as does Timothy West.In fact, compared to the Merchant Ivory version, most of the characters have a little more nuanced colour in their cheeks, with the exception of Freddie and Mrs Honeychurch. What stops this taking off and flying is the lack of real vitality in the script and a lot of direction which tends toward the pedestrian.Although, on balance, I think I still prefer the Merchant Ivory version, there's plenty enough here to enjoy.

I'd like to say how much I enjoyed this ITV remake. I'd like to, and I had been prepared to until the final five minutes of the film, but I can't.In the interest of full disclosure, I've always been a huge fan of the 1985 Merchant Ivory adaptation, so I was prepared not to like this. I was pleasantly surprised as the story unwound. To its credit, this version makes much more of the class difference between George and Lucy which wasn't as obvious in the other one, with the aristocratic-looking Helena Bonham Carter and Julian Sands in the leads.In retrospect, HBC and Sands both come off as too remote and stiff -- unfortunate in a film that is supposed to be about a young woman's sexual awakening and young man who feels truly alive. Rafe Spall and Elaine Cassidy suit the parts admirably, giving their characters a warm sexiness that their predecessors never could.SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER -- My HUGE problem with this adaptation is the completely unnecessary ending tacked on in a rare misstep by Andrew Davies, which takes place 10 years after the events we have just seen. Lucy has returned for a bittersweet visit to Florence, where we learn that her beloved husband George was killed in WWI. She takes a nostalgic trip to the meadow where she and George first kissed, and the film ends with the completely bizarre suggestion that she will end up with the carriage driver Paolo who led her to George on that fateful day! I don't have a problem, in general, with adapters taking liberties with their source material, but this ending feels utterly ridiculous. If Davies wanted to suggest the looming war or play up more of the class struggle, surely there were other ways to do it. The film up to that point had been about truly being alive. Showing us that George has died undoes the joy that has preceded and feels like nothing so much as superfluous, self-indulgent twaddle.Disappointing, Mr. Davies.