1983 Directed by Colin Gregg
A faithful dramatization of Virginia Woolf's novel. A lecturer, his family, the spinster Aunt Lily, an old friend, and a student, Charles Tansley, spend a summer in an isolated house in Cornwall just before World War I. The stern Mr. Ramsay scolds everybody, while Mrs. Ramsay is the linchpin in keeping the family together. Aunt Lily paints, and the family talk about sailing to the lighthouse, but the trip is always postponed.
UK
UK
Someone had the gall to make a movie adaptation of To the Lighthouse. It takes a great visionary to translate a novel that lives in the consciousness of its characters into film, so what do you get when the vision is impaired? A movie that is too detestable even for nonreaders. The score is inappropriate, the production is cheap, the casting is boring, and the screenplay is hilariously horrible. One can expect a character to jump into speeches, to think out loud, at every chance they get to be alone. This film shows that some books are better left alone.
A single 2-hour long shot of the lighthouse would represent Virginia Woolf’s novel better than this film. #notimpressed
I own this film for two reasons: out of passion for the novel and to see 23-year-old Kenneth Branagh in his first major film role.
Unfortunately, there is little more reason to praise it. Did anyone involved read the book? There are characters with the same names as in the sublime Virginia Woolf masterpiece, but they are not quite right, and they…do so much. The entire theme and form of the book have been jettisoned. Which is expected but shameful.
And then they fill the script with speeches that aren’t even among the many words Woolf wrote.
Fun note: Mr Ramsay went in to play Alfred in the first three nineties Batman movies, and Mrs Ramsay was Aunt May in the three Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies.
No idea how faithful to the book. Filmed as a straightforward historical drama.
