Word: winstone
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...THIS END, John Hurt, as Winston, is also marvelous. Previously John Merrick in The Elephant Man and the fool in Olivier's King Lear, Hurt is the archetypal common man, his face a veritable roadmap of toil and suffering. His love scenes with the fresh-faced Suzanna Hamilton (Julia) are as tenderly pathetic as the tiny, dilapitated room in which they take place. He is dwarfed by a huge video screen as he sits hunched and writes in his diary, an action that seems both puny and heroic. Throughout the film, Hurt never loses that peculiar combination of hope...
...THIS END, John Hurt, as Winston, is also marvelous. Previously John Merrick in The Elephant Manand the fool in Olivier's King Lear. Hurt is the archetypal common man, his face a veritable roadmap of toil and suffering. His love scenes with the fresh-faced Suzanna Hamilton (Julia) are as tenderly pathetic as the tiny, dilapitated room in which they take place. He is dwarfed by a huge video screen as he sits hunched and writes in his diary, an action that seems both puny and heroic. Throughout the film, Hurt never loses that peculiar combination of hope and fatalistic...
Occasionally, though, this emotional barrage can be tiresome. Radford gives us endless scenes of Winston standing on a lusciously green hillside, symbolizing his longing for an ideal world. This repetition seems out of character with the action pace of the film: more at home with the bogus psychological exploitation of Pink Floyd's The Wall than Orwell. Especially pretentious is the final shot of this sequence, where we learn that this mythical "Green Acres" lies in Rm, 101, the room of everyone's worst fear. Mixing symbols like this might work for a Bergman, but it has failed almost everybody...
Equally flaccid is Radford's one stab at interpreting Orwell. After Winston's love has been ripped out of him and he has renounced Julia and himself, he sits alone and scrawls "2 plus 2 equals" in the dust of a café tabletop. The purpose of this open-ended conclusion is a mystyery only God and Bergman, but certainly not Radford, can solve. Not only does it break the emotional tone of the film and make the viewer think, but it leaves the viewer with half-developed food for thought. A far more appropriate ending would have been Orwell...
...good thing about this film though, is that you don't notice its many flaws until you leave the theatre. The film bullies you in the same way the O'Brien bullies Winston, breaking down your resistance and forcing you to despair. When Winston cracks under the threat of the rat cage and screams "Do to Julia," the actual sound of the cry sends shivers up your spine in a way that mere printed words cannot...