Directed by Terence Davies
(R)
***
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This “exceptionally well-made” film is “as fiercely committed to passion as its heroine, and that’s saying a lot,” said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Rachel Weisz has devoted “every fiber of her being” to bringing to life a post–World War II Londoner who believes so deeply in love’s primacy that she falls into despair when the man she’s wrecked her stable marriage for turns out to want something less. Director Terence Davies (The House of Mirth) stays perhaps too true to the 1952 play he’s adapting here, said Rex Reed in The New York Observer. Terence Rattigan’s “awkward, brilliant, and demanding” drama opens with its heroine, Hester, attempting suicide in an act of reckless romanticism that in 2012 merely feels “outdated and naïve.” Yet Weisz’s character survives, and the actress manages to make the aftermath haunting. We even eventually learn that there was more to her despair than that her beau had forgotten her birthday, said Connie Ogle in The Miami Herald. But that initial detail makes Hester “a hard woman to pity.” Many viewers will feel they have “no real reason to care” what happens next.
