Wetherby, Part the First

I'm in love again...and I love, love, love it...

I am totally in love with a movie that I have not been able to see the end of yet. I tried to watch it this weekend between recovering from the galloping crud and being tired with the time change. (of course, it's easy to be tired with the time change when you stayed up too late on Saturday night just...fooling around at home)

Wetherby appears to have been made in the 90s although if I weren't so lazy, I could go check on IMDB...and stars the wonderful and incomparable Vanessa Redgrave as a very gifted teacher in England (in a small town named Wetherby) who holds a dinner party. Her best friend attends (Judi Densch) and so does a young man whom she assumes has come with the friend. But, not so, and a few days later he returns, brings her pheasant he has just shot, and reveals to her that he merely introduced himself to the best friend outside the cottage before the dinner (yes, an English cottage...but not in that "English Cottage" sort of way) and joined the party. Everyone assumed someone else knew him. As she gasps laughingly in surprise that he has actually done this, the young man--Andrew Morgan--pulls a pistol from his pocket, places it in his mouth, and kills himself. Noisily. Messily. Redgrave's character tells the police that she feels the young man identified with her in terms of being alone.

Redgrave's daughter Joely Richardson plays Redgrave's character in flashbacks to her youth where she seems headed for a life of love and, if not marriage, at least companionship. A young woman Morgan had dated until she had had enough of his strangeness shows up on Redgrave's doorstep.

and that is where I managed to fall asleep...and wish I had not. I love the way in which the film explores themes of the interconnectedness of a successful public life and a life of private solitude. This is a film that lets adults actually put the pieces together rather than hammering the viewer in the head with an obvious plotline.

I'm going to finish it--and I will post again. I promise. Meanwhile, to quote Roger Ebert (granted, about Apocalypse Now) this is a movie.