Antonio Nimertis
The human condition truly looks with a garden ... for some it is green, dense and majestic ... for others poor and dying, or abandoned and messy ; for some completely nonexistent ... Yet all the features from the early days did not change, not cancelled ... they're just waiting for you ... the allegory that takes care of the mental determinants of life is ahead of you, every day, every moment ... you don't have to be an expert, you learn ... There is no need to have born connoisseur, you train yourself ... you are not required to be gifted, you blossom ... all talents you had but could not sense them ... all the colors, smells, shapes ... you need the light of the meeting with yourself, the other, the Whole ... After all, if you don't recognize the beauty in your own inner bio-cosmos, with what right you blame the ugliness of others?
lavatch
Tom Wilkinson is an actor who never fails to please, even in an average, low-budget film like "The Beautiful Fantastic." In this slow-moving fable, the film follows the life of a foundling child, Miss Bella Brown, who grows up to be obsessed with order. She is especially skillful as a mousy librarian who seemingly knows every book in the local library. But her definition of order does not include the outdoors and the paradigm of what is considered order in nature: a garden.The story unfolds around the flimsy premise that Miss Brown will be evicted from her home unless she can transform her unkempt backyard into a beautiful garden. The "magic garden" scenario is played out alongside a children's story that Bella is writing about a fantastic creature. The unconvincing romantic subplot evolves between a library patron who is an inventor and Miss Brown. Sadly, there is not a scintilla of chemistry between the characters.The various narrative strands never come together in the film. But the most engaging scenes are those with Bella in conversation with her neighbor, a curmudgeon and lover of flora named Alfred "Alfie" Stevenson. As Alfie, Wilkinson shines with the one-liners and the character choices of a nasty old man with a heart of gold.One especially glaring weakness with the film was the big build-up to the moment when Bella, working with the assistance of Alfie, finally completes her garden. Inexplicably, we never even see the entire garden, only glimpse a portion of the pond during the celebration. The filmmakers dropped the ball in not creating for the viewer a spectacular floral enclave that was the fruit of the labors of Bella, Alfie, and the long-suffering Irishman, Vernon, a widower who is clearly in love with Bella. With the exception of Alfie, the characters in this film were one-dimensional, cardboard cutouts. And the viewers were left in the lurch, as we were frantically screaming, "Show us the garden!"As a expert gardener, Alfie delivers a memorable metaphor of the ideal garden as "a world of beautifully ordered chaos." Unfortunately, the film had plenty of chaos, but lacked the beauty and the order of a garden that was never revealed to the audience.
annlevtex
I confess I watched this movie for the actors, particularly Jessica Brown-FIndlay and Tom Wilkinson. I know Andrew Scott from "Sherlock", of which I am not a particular fan, but he is a fine actor. Jeremy Irvine? I've only ever seen him in "War Horse." As it happens his character kind of throws a wrench into the film for me, not due to his performance which is winning enough, but because I found it unnecessary. As someone else said, I kind of wanted the Scott character to "get the girl" and I think that would have been a nice twist? But no matter, the JBF/Wilkinson/Scott triad forms a nice solid core to the film in the end. Is the movie a little twee? Yes, but I expected that and I don't think it pretends to be otherwise. But even within the short 90-minute time frame, the characters develop enough to be nuanced and balanced. Wilkinson's acerbic Alfie softens, JBF's mousy Bella bristles and Scott's Vernon mans up. The central gardening/nature metaphor works really beautifully (sorry), inspiring both the score and cinematography which are lovely. The scene where Bella first sees Alfie's garden is particularly charming.Maybe it's because I happen to be dealing with a big gardening challenge of my own right now, but I was actually moved by this film in the end. I'd say it takes itself just seriously enough, and the warm, understated performances and specific chemistry make it a good watch.
p-seed-889-188469
A strange little movie this but it will no doubt appeal to lovers of the "British Gem" movie genre. Personally I find "British Gem" the 2 most feared words in the English language (or possibly first equal with "Human Resources") but evidently enough movie goers find them appealing enough for the British to keep churning them out. That's fine with me as long as I am warned in the movie's promotional material so I can do something more enjoyable, like plunge my hand into a vat of boiling oil.Some reviewers have compared this movie to Amelie but I wouldn't agree. While the first few minutes of the movie attempts to give some bizarre back story to explain how eccentric the heroine (Bella) supposedly is, for the duration of the movie itself she acts completely normally, apart from a touch of OCD. Her apparent need to be orderly certainly plays no part in the story, in fact it is completely contradictory to the way she lives, with her garden in chaos, which is somewhat confusing. Amelie was strong and always in control and her quirkiness was pivotal to that movie. Bella is never in control and she is not inherently quirky, she is just lost, unfulfilled and drifting. However it is true that both movies rely on the appeal of an attractive actress who has a certain quality that one would be hard pressed to accurately define - perhaps "instantly lovable" is somewhere near.As others have noted the "plot" is completely predictable and the "characters" are all the usual suspects for this kind of movie. It is all a bit of fluff and I doubt it will be challenging "War and Peace" for a place in World literature any time soon.For all that I enjoyed this movie more than I expected and this is entirely down to the actors, who generally handled their fairly thankless and undemanding roles with subtlety. In the wrong hands this movie could very easily have tipped the scales from just teetering on the edge of working into something horrific, and it is a credit to the cast that they pitched it just right.I saw this movie with a group and the comments ranged from "the worst movie I have ever seen in my life" to "quaint" and "exquisite". My view is somewhere in between.
AD
