UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

darken-4 I came to this film fairly late. Anyone who loves Maggie Smith or enjoys movies with romantic European settings should have an opportunity to understand what they are getting. Beautiful settings, nice camera-work, believable characters, nicely stitched together story until we get close to the end when the main character (was this the directors intention???) reveals that she has a serious problem with alcohol, so much so that it puts a bizarre & uncomfortable twist to a scene in the uncle's bedroom in which we see a boozed up post-cougar woman who appears to expose herself & throw herself at an unwilling & terrified victim. A whole scene that is oiled by the bottle of booze she is cradling. My main question at the end of the film is why this uncle would surrender his beautiful niece to the tender mercies of an old woman who smokes too much & is clearly an alcoholic with a load of unresolved issues. A strange & unsettling ending.

Philby-3 It is interesting that Chris Cooper should show up in this glossy HBO production (as an uptight American college professor) – he was later to play a leading role in "Adaptation", Charlie Kaufman's brilliant and quirky take on the perils of adapting fine literary properties to the silver screen. What seems to have happened here is that two veteran TV hacks, Richard Loncraine and Hugh Whitemore have got hold of an elegiac novella by the fine Anglo-Irish author William Trevor and turned it into something suitable for Sunday night HBO TV audiences. I was going to say "mush", but that would do a disservice to the cast, who are excellent, and the great location shooting. Definitely though, this film is less that the sum of its parts and much of the poignancy of Trevor's novella has been lost. Yet apart from the final scenes the producers have stuck fairly closely to Trevor's storyline, and Maggie Smith in particular manages to create a character, Emily Delahunty, at least recognizable from the novel, a vibrant but rather hollowed out survivor of a tough and colourful life.It is 1987 (according to the novella, anyway – the film is a bit vaguer about time) and Mrs Delahunty "56 years old" lives in Umbria where she lets out rooms in her magnificent country villa and churns out "Romance novels" a la Barbara Cartland. She is unlucky enough to be caught in a bomb explosion on the Roma-Milano express which kills several passengers in her compartment (though no-one else). Recovering in hospital she invites the survivors back to her villa, where she (and they) are looked after by her staff, including her general factotum, an eccentric Irishman called Quinty (Timothy Spall. The survivors are an elderly English gent, called the General (Ronnie Barker), a young German man with severe burns, Werner (Otlar in the book and played here by Benno Furmann) and Aimee (Emmy Clarke), a beautiful eight year old, who is physically unharmed but unable to speak after her parents have died in the explosion. The healing effects of the landscape and good living restore the spirits of the survivors but then Aimee's uptight pill of an uncle (Chris Cooper) arrives to take her back to America. Mrs Delahunty, haunted both by dreams of her own past and other things, tries desperately to keep Aimee. In the meantime the Italian plod, in the person of Inspector Girotti (Giancarlo Gianini) is investigating the bomb blast, and the finger of suspicion is pointing at Werner.I won't reveal the ending but pretty obviously it is at variance with the book's. If it had followed the book, this would have been a minor gem. As it was made, it is indeed further evidence of the perils of the adaptation of literary properties to film. The acting's faultless, the scenery lovely, but the ending's a cop-out.

Brigid O Sullivan (wisewebwoman) William Trevor's story was complex and involved a train wreck and the adaptation of the inner voice of the principal, Mrs. Emily Delahunty, played magnificently by Maggie Smith, must have been an enormous challenge. Maggie does wondrously in this, both in her speculations on the lives around her and the deep dark secrets of her own past.The plot briefly, is that the survivors of a bomb on a rail carriage come together in Mrs. Delahunty's B&B in the poppy strown fields of Umbria in Italy: A retired widower general (an incredibly touching performance by the comedian Ronnie Barker) who loses his daughter, a German who loses his new love and a little girl who loses her parents.How this oddball mix of people bond so very slowly into a new, loving formation is the crux of the story and the Maguffin is the arrival of the child's estranged uncle, Tom Riversmith (an amazing Chris Cooper) who has never met his niece due to his own family dysfunction.Maggie is amazing as she sometimes lurches around accompanied by a glass of grappa and reveals bits and pieces of her own heart breaking childhood and through the power of the grappa makes come-ons to a cold and aloof John who recoils from her passion and eccentricity. His distaste is palpable.You believe her tenderness for the orphan child. The scenery and house in Umbria are magnificent as is the creation of the English garden.The only weakness was the business about the German and how quickly he disappeared into plot line malfunction, that could have been omitted as by the time he faded I was quite attached to his kindness and consideration to all. Timothy Spall, one of my all time favourites from Mike Leigh films, plays an Irish factotum to Mrs. Delahunty with his own story and possible affair with Mrs. D. in the distant past. The ending diverted from the novella but I agree, the novella's ending was far too bleak and would have twisted the cinematic Umbrian paradise unfavourably. Not for action fans or A-B plot line advocates. A treasure for those who love to read and/or watch adaptations. 9 out of 10. I would see it again.

cliffs_of_fall Too many reviews here and in print misinterpret My House in Umbria as another sweet movie in the Big Scenery genre, too few emphasize the film's essential theme of fictions and illusions. And yet, are they really illusions when you are aware of weaving them? Emily Delahunty has just experienced something absolutely horrific and over the course of the film, we learn too of her early losses and calamities. Somewhere along the line, she chose happiness; in fact, she chooses it time and again. Her foil in the movie is the Chris Cooper character, a cold man whose scientific mind brooks no illusions. She's persistent with him. She wants to draw him out and draw him in, seducing him into her enchanted world view. She may succeed a little. She'll certainly succeed with anyone who mindfully watches this tale unfold. If this is a fairy tale, it's a stunningly contemporary one. We who rise every morning and meet each day's challenges with some enthusiasm, we who continue to love, work and create in a world threatened by terrorism, live this fairy tale too.