Review of The Heart of Me

Why can't the private sector deliver sleepwalking junk-TV like this? Why does one of the few surviving public broadcasters on earth have to waste resources on such mediocre pap? The script should have been thrown out by BBC Drama execs on sight. It breaks all the rules. No hero, no heroine, no love interest, no sub-plot, no climax in the third act. It should have been binned right away. Only a director named "Thaddeus" could have been persuaded to take it on. Not one of the characters is even slightly plausible, and only their removal into some remote pre-war era gives them some spurious credibility. The working class --- er, that's 90 per cent of the UK population at the time --- is airbrushed out. Even the Second World War is reduced to the status of a prop and a 'deus ex machina'. Dinah and Madeleine obviously should have been swapped: Olivia Williams is irresistibly sexy even when playing a frigid wife, while the squat, pinch-faced Bonham-Carter has to plaster on the make-up to persuade her 40 years to look more like 30 (and definitely not 20). Paul Bettany struggles to make a manipulable goon and upper-middle class twit seem of consequence. His deeply unsympathetic behaviour and unmotivated, pathetic end (walking brainlessly into a Nazi bombing raid) plead for a well-deserved tearing up and binning. Rather than committing suicide, his character would have bought all the sex he wanted from the millions of sex-trade workers available in that era. Why throw up everything for a bisexual hippy? All three main characters seem to be desperately searching around for a sub-plot to give their lives meaning. Olivia Williams's agent should be shot.