Bleecker Street
There’s a feeling that you sometimes get when watching certain types of movies, which I often think of as a sort of ‘trying too hard’. This can happen with indie movies much the same as blockbusters, although anything with a ‘message’ behind it might strain to tell that message. This can also be easily tied into adaptation woes, as some books are not so easily translated into visual storytelling — there are far more pitfalls than some might expect.
The World to Come comes from director Mona Fastvold and was written by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, based on the story of the same name by Shepard. I haven’t read the story, so I don’t know for sure about how it’s been handled, but it does seem a little too close to a purely written story than a screenplay. We mainly follow Abigail (Katherine Waterston), a housewife to a poor farmer in the 19th century, who starts the movie by reading what seem like diary entries about her loss of a child.
Naturally that affects her life in horrible ways, including making things harder with her husband Dyer (Casey Affleck, in a typical mumbling, bearded manner for him) and unwilling to try for another child. The movie is permeated with grief, although this is often told with very long stretches of pure narration — that is the primary way we learn anything, we hear Abigail’s voice over narration the entire movie. And it feels way too close to just someone reading from the original written story. People watch movies for the sound and the sights.
It’s perhaps one of the most extreme cases of ‘tell instead of show’ I’ve seen in quite a while. But things get a bit more interesting when a new couple moves in nearby, husband Finney (Christopher Abbott) and wife Tallie (Vanessa Kirby). Finney has an odd, maybe neurodivergent way about him, although it’s not really fully explored. Tallie is a more light, sprightly character, a bit too close to that ‘manic pixie dreamgirl’ cliché in some ways than intended.
The two women realize that they have a deep connection, far more than with their husbands, both of whom simply seem to be clods or worse, deeply troubled. There is a kind of light, pleasant chemistry between the two women, although it never crosses past that to anything truly deep to me — again, the narration is doing so much heavy lifting, it’s hard sometimes just to focus on the acting by the two leads.
Eventually the movie simply decides to go for tragedy again, and it never truly feels as emotionally connective as it ought to. Both Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby do a fine job here, but their dialogue is not so interesting and their characters not fully fleshed out. It’s also a kind of ‘what is this story really trying to say?’ — that being a lesbian in the 19th century was difficult? That men are dangerous and untrustworthy?
It’s all a bit muddled and the pace too slow for much of the movie to really be interesting. It’s a shame, because I do like both of the lead actresses a lot, and it would be nice to see them outside more genre fare. I think the real underlying problem is an adherence to the words on the page, when sometimes, less is more. Perhaps the original story was great in written form, but that doesn’t mean that writing a screenplay from it is as easy as they may have thought.
Planning to see The World to Come? Click below to see the movie, and be sure to come back and tell us what you thought!
The World to Come has a run time of 1 hour 45 minutes and rated R for some sexuality/nudity.
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