Winter's Tale (2014)

Winter's Tale arrives as a passion project that Martin Scorsese once called unfilmable, and the finished product does little to embarrass his judgment. Akiva Goldsman writes, produces, and directs this adaptation of Mark Helprin's 1983 novel, a romantic fantasy in which a burglar named Peter Lake loves a consumptive heiress, survives a century of amnesia, and ascends to the stars on the back of a winged white horse. The film is sincere to the point of strangeness. It is also a commercial catastrophe, grossing thirty million dollars against a budget twice that size.

The cultural ledger is thin. The cast is almost entirely white, with Will Smith and Graham Greene appearing in supporting turns that never treat identity as a subject. The opening sequence, in which immigrant parents are turned away from Manhattan because they carry tuberculosis, plays as tragic backstory instead of social argument. Beverly and Virginia exist chiefly as a dying muse and a protective mother, their interior lives subordinated to Peter's journey. There is no queer presence, no environmental concern, no critique of the publishing fortune surrounding the Penn family. Illness is romanticized rather than examined, and the body serves as a vessel for metaphor, not politics.

The film offers a sentimental doctrine, repeated with a straight face: every person is born with a miracle inside and destined to become a star. That arrives as romantic whimsy, not as a sermon, which keeps the lecturing at a low murmur. The result is a motion picture with almost no contemporary social agenda to speak of, and a surplus of earnest celestial nonsense. It means well. It means well for two hours, which is its own kind of endurance test. The white horse is the only character with a coherent plan, and it flies away before the credits, presumably to find better material. We are left with snow, name plates, and a moral about destiny that dissolves on contact. A sommelier would call this vintage forgettable. The cellar is full of it.

Classification: a book adaptation, nothing more. No Oscar, no sequel, no remake, no true story, no superhero, and a seventh-place opening weekend that keeps it far from the top of the chart. It means well. That is the entire report.

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