Sven-Erik Palmbring A story that raises many questions, even good ones, but gives only a few answers. A great cast, James Wilby is for example excellent as Tony Last, goes to work in this beautifully filmed melodrama set in the early thirties i UK and Brazil. The period feeling is great and so are the settings. The story is built up around a doomed marriage, but it is hard to really understand why. There is a lot of smoke here but no real fire until the late and great Sir Alec Guiness comes to work in the last 30 minutes creating a frightening illiterate fan of Charles Dickens. But superb acting on all hands and high class camera-work is not enough although the film is worth watching especially if you have a love for British culture and history, and don't we all...

The_Other_Snowman British television of the 1980's managed to produce scores of movies and miniseries based on classic novels. Name a book by a British author of the 19th or early 20th centuries, and you can bet there's an adaptation for British TV. Most of them are faithful, well-acted, full of authentic period details, and don't have the same nettlesome commercial sensibilities of American TV. A lot of them are very good: for example, the long series of Sherlock Holmes stories starring Jeremy Brett, or Fortunes of War with Emma Thompson.One problem: they tended to crank these things out, with the same actors and directors, so that one period piece set at an English country manor featuring well-spoken actors in tailored tweeds looks and feels more or less like any other period piece set at an English country manor featuring well-spoken actors in tailored tweeds.With Evelyn Waugh, that's a big problem. Waugh is a hilariously funny writer, even when he's writing about infidelity and death and the other terrible things that happen in "A Handful of Dust". So the film version, with Kristen Scott-Thomas, Alec Guiness, and Stephen Fry in a small role, follows the plot of the book, and uses much of the dialogue, but they've cut out most of the humor.Take a scene from the book where Tony and Jock get very drunk and telephone Brenda (Tony's wife) and stagger around to her flat in the middle of the night. In the book this scene goes on for several pages -- they phone her, get lost, phone again, have a few more drinks, etc -- but in the movie it lasts all of two minutes. In another part of the book there's a parish priest who recycles his sermons from thirty years earlier, all of which were written while he served in the army in Afghanistan; the parishioners don't mind the references to deserts and jungles and tigers. That's not in the movie at all.It's not a bad movie, just very disappointing if you've read the book. "Bright Young Things", Stephen Fry's more recent adaptation of Waugh's "Vile Bodies" was a much more accurate version of Waugh's black humor and satire. The humor is almost entirely missing from "Handful of Dust".

newday98074 A really good book cannot be entirely simulated adequately on screen. There is too much going on underneath, too many subplots, too much conversation and description to undertake in two hours. Choices made by production folk determine which direction the film will go, generally accenting one plot line of or other and allowing the rest to fall to the wayside. HOD does a fine job with the route it takes, darkly stating the consequences of empty lives which rely on artifice for sustenance. These creatures were not creating their lives so much as feeding their idea of existence without exploration. The result is tragedy but the tragedy was already in existence. The actions of the trapped subjects simply began to reflect their emptiness. This doesn't make for a happy movie but it is instructive if one chooses to see the lessons. And as art, the acting, direction and cinematography are quite fine.

jackie-107 At the end of this film, one wants to wash one's hands of the unmitigated cruelty pervading the atmosphere. The deliberate pace of the thirties setting (beautifully portrayed using the right houses, and suitable sets and costumes) ensures that every nuance of behaviour is clearly understood by the audience, and this is the great strength of the film. As I haven't read the book, but believe this is a faithful adaptation, I can commend both Charles Sturridge and the superb actors for translating what must be a difficult, but brilliant, novel by Evelyn Waugh, not only into an impressive film, but one that conveys thirties morals and social privilege in a way that rings true for today's 21st century attitudes. I think this is the best performance I have ever seen by James Wilby. Cuckolded by his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas in a fantastic debut performance), suffering from the death of his only son, he turns from a kind and gentle husband to one who wreaks revenge on his wife by cutting off all financial support. His agony over his son is exactly restrained in the manner of the period, his embarrassment over setting up the grounds for divorce by being caught in flagrante, his bewilderment when one would think he should be released from torment but is trapped by a vindictive eccentric (Alec Guinness, as usual, quite amazing) in the middle of the jungle, after nearly dying of fever, is a tour de force. This is his film, but Kristin Scott-Thomas (who was the original reason I watched this film in the first place), is simply delightful as the spoil, bored wife who can't resist Rupert Graves's boyish charm and dilettante lifestyle. No wonder Robert Altman chose her for Gosford Park; she is made for these roles. Her character's brittle insouciance, total selfishness and insensitivity, her lack of concern for her husband and son while she pursues alleviation from boredom with Rupert Graves, is reminiscent of Daisy Buchanan's behaviour in The Great Gatsby. Kristin Scott-Thomas shows a sophistication and acting aplomb which is breathtaking.Rupert Graves is convincing as the shallow man-about-town sponging off others but seducing charming to the ladies; Judi Dench gives a lovely cameo as his bourgeois mother; Cathryn Harrison is good as Millie, who is supposed to provide the evidence for the divorce; and Alec Guinness in one of his final roles, is chillingly menacing. I recommend this movie to anyone who enjoys a good story well told, excellent acting, and a period setting.