Charles Sturridge's large-screen version of E M Forster's tragicomic masterpiece of class and culture clash is as buttoned up as the corsets and starched shirts it's characters wear. The movie is wrong-footed and scenes don't build to anything. Everything is held in reserve until the whole film seems on the verge of disappearing, (which it finally does, unsatisfactorily, racing through the final scenes). While Helena Bonham Carter and Rupert Graves just about get their characters, (you want to slap them, and hard, but at least you feel as if they are real), and Helen Mirren is full of life, (until she dies in childbirth), Judy Davis' performance as mad aunt Harriet takes her usual screaming harpy to unrestrained heights even for her, while Giovanni Guidelli's bland, handsome romantic hero is hopelessly inadequate. This is the team that made "Brideshead Revisited" for television; perhaps if they had six hours of TV time they might just have pulled this off as a decent series. Nevertheless, I can't help feeling that as it stands Merchant/Ivory could have made the masterpiece that Forster's book so obviously is.
Review of Where Angels Fear to Tread
