Longtime screenwriter Akiva Goldsman's (A Beautiful Mind, I Am Legend) debut as a director has finally arrived, and it comes in the form of an adaptation of an apparently well-liked and certainly ridiculous novel by Mark Helprin. Winter’s Tale is kind of a romance, but also kind of a story about angels and demons, and even sort of a time travel tale. It’s very much concerned with how light connects people, how dead people become stars, how every human being is given one miracle, and how Satan’s minions tend to do his bidding by putting together gangs of pickpockets. If all of that sounds like it’s too much to fit into one story, it is. Winter’s Tale is one of the most poorly-written, tonally confused, plot hole-ridden movies that’s come around in a while.
The film stars Colin Farrell as a thief who’s currently trying to leave the lifestyle and who was abandoned as an infant by two parents who had Eastern European accents of some sort, was raised by a man who seems to be a Native American of some sort, but who nonetheless speaks with an Irish lilt. The object of his affection is a shut-in virgin played by Jessica Brown Findlay, who suffers from a form of tuberculosis that causes her body to generate so much heat that she almost qualifies as being an X-Man. His antagonist is his former employer, a demon named Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe) who wants to see him killed for bailing on his gang. Oh yeah, there’s also a magical horse, who’s an even bigger plot contrivance than Gandalf’s eagle friends, and who never fails to provide a laugh when he shows up to hang out with Colin Farrell in the middle of New York City.
Crowe preens and postures while giving one of the worst, loudest, most embarrassing performances you can imagine. Farrell, on the other end of the spectrum, seems to be asleep for the vast majority of his scenes. The only thing the movie manages to stumble into doing correctly is to confirm that Brown Findlay has a star quality about her, but anyone who watched the first couple seasons of Downton Abbey already knew that. One doesn’t need to sit through Winter’s Tale to see that she’s going places. Though maybe one should, because it’s really so ridiculous that it needs to be seen to be believed. At one point this film introduces us to a vivacious woman who runs a newspaper even though she’d be well over a hundred years old by the story’s own timeline. That’s in the third act. In the first, Farrell’s character scales a wall with a grappling hook. Somewhere in the second we’re given the most intense scene built around a home furnace this side of The ‘burbs. This movie has absolutely everything.
