Word: gilbert
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Gilbert and Sullivan need a hit. Princess Ida is just not doing the sort of business they're used to. But Sullivan (Corduner) wants to write something more serious than comic operettas. And Gilbert (Broadbent) keeps trying to recycle stale story lines that his collaborator (and the critics) dismiss...
Their solution to this problem--based on Gilbert's chance encounter with Japanese culture at a London exhibition--turns out to be The Mikado. And Mike Leigh's movie about mounting that best of all G. & S. works turns out to be one of the year's more beguiling surprises. It is not at all the sort of thing one expects from Leigh, the very sober creator of films like Naked and Secrets and Lies, for it is basically the story--somewhat comic, somewhat desperate, very carefully detailed--of rehearsing and putting on the operetta...
What gives Topsy-Turvy its heartfelt heft is the way in which it shows how this process takes over everyone's life--eventually driving out all distractions, whether they be Gordon's defeat at Khartoum, the sterilities of Gilbert's marriage or the many anxious neuroses of the acting company. It is show biz as therapy, with all tensions temporarily resolved when the show is a hit. But there is also a sense of real, very Mike Leighish, life in this film that darkens and transforms it. And transfixes...
...looked gorgeous. From the stark isolation of the mountainous orphanage and the gray and white sterility of its interior to the rolling shores of the coast and the vast stretches of the apple farms, the movie is set against a stunning landscape. Director Lasse Hallstrom (What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, Something to Talk About, Abba: The Movie) strikes a balance between the dourness of the orphanage with the optimism of the coast, while not letting the movie get too caught up in either locale...
...sexual abuse looming--but the mood is warm and precise, as a flinty, laudanum-addicted doctor (the excellent Michael Caine) tutors his brightest charge (Tobey Maguire, the most watchful of young actors) to be his protege. Hallstrom, here as in My Life as a Dog and What's Eating Gilbert Grape, lets the characters carry the story without allowing the actors to push too hard. This is a film with the wisdom to see the myopia in good men, the charm in men who do bad things...