Word: radford
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George Orwell's 1984 was and is so profoundly disturbing because it dares to question the ultimate reality of this love. Michael Radford, director of the new film adaptation of 1984, recognizes and emphasizes Orwell's emotional message over the oft-discussed socio-political implications of Big Brother. On the printed page, Orwell's Oceana can be a bit dry and scholarly; on film it is nothing short of terrifying...
...Radford is fully conscious that he is dealing not with an ordinary novel but an almost universally read, overanalyzed, modern WORA. Like an old friend, the film assumes both your familiarity and your desire to relive the force of some old memories. Radford leaves out the technical explanations of the Oceanic regime (as set forth in Immanuel Goldstein's didactic book) and lets the viewer fill in the holes...
Against this complexity of emotion. Radford masterfully exploits the iciness of Richard Burton's Inner Party member, O'Brien. Whether torturing or consoling, Burton never moves a facial muscle or changes an inflection. He is the ideal Party member, a living synthesis of rose dogma spouted without intellect or feeling. Burton's coldly surreal performance is as horrifying as the best Becket...
...become perhaps the most pervasive fiction of the nuclear age. Any would-be movie adapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four knows that a work so well and easily remembered requires revision if the film is to evoke a response beyond the merely respectful. In these circumstances, the achievement of Michael Radford and his actors is subtle and brave...
...were suffering the last stages of consumption; repellent in his grayness and enervation, Hurt is oddly compelling too. As Julia, Suzanna Hamilton plays her harshly lighted love scenes with a nakedness, both physical and emotional, that is astonishing in its neediness. By making the romance more explicit, Radford gives it a pathos and a symbolic weight that are, if anything, more affecting than in the novel. Finally, the late Richard Burton as O'Brien, the couple's betrayer and interrogator, gives a last performance that is all silky corruption, perfumed malice in every beautifully measured phrase...