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Magnificent Ambersons, The
A&E Video // Unrated // February 26, 2002
List Price: $24.95 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Sometimes one element of a film stands far above (or below) the rest, whether it's acting, production, or script; in cases like that, it's easy to point to that one element and say "that's what makes this film great (or terrible)." In other films, however, the effect is created not by one outstanding element, but by many different parts of the production adding up to create the overall effect. In the case of The Magnificent Ambersons, the latter case holds true: even though none of the component pieces of the film is absolutely terrible, the combined effect of many not-quite-right elements results in a movie that just doesn't work.
Watching The Magnificent Ambersons left me profoundly unmoved and uninterested. But why, when in comparison I'd been totally swept away by an apparently very similar production, The Forsyte Saga? That's the crucial question... and one that's remarkably hard to pin down.
The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the story of the Amberson family, a wealthy family in the midwestern United States at the turn of the century. Like other period pieces, it relies to a certain extent on costuming and decoration to set the tone of the film and to provide a context for the character drama that unfolds.
One key failure of The Magnificent Ambersons is that one of its important characters is thoroughly unlikable. And the character of George Amberson Minafer (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is indeed unlikable. He's neither an "anti-hero" nor a flawed but interesting figure: he's a egotistical, rude, unpleasant young man with no apparent redeeming qualities. In the first scenes we see him in, he dashes into a kind of romance with young Lucy Morgan (Gretchen Mol), though this relationship appears to happen by dictate of the plot rather than naturally arising from the characters. After a while, long enough to decide that this young man is nobody I'm interested in knowing more about, the film flashes back to his childhood. Guess what? He is revealed to have been an egotistical, spoiled, rude, and generally unpleasant person from the very beginning. How this is supposed to make us care about him as a character is unclear indeed, and in fact I actively disliked him throughout the film.
If the character of George is enough to put a bad flavor on the film, what about the other characters? The Magnificent Ambersons appears to be presenting an ensemble cast, so perhaps the other actors can take up the slack. Unfortunately, this does not turn out to be the case. The opening scene of the film is a fancy ball, in which we are introduced to a very large number of characters all in a rush. Which ones are the important ones? It's unclear. Similarly unclear are the relationships between the characters; the film attempts to have dramatic moments between the various people from the very beginning, but it all falls flat: if we don't know who they are, and have no reason to care about them, it really doesn't matter who they're dancing with or who was whose former suitor. As with the character of George, a set of flashbacks apparently tries to lay the groundwork of characterization for his mother Isabel (Madeleine Stowe) and her one-time suitor Eugene Morgan (Bruce Greenwood), but somehow it just doesn't work. I didn't care about the characters in the film's present storyline, and I didn't care about how they got there, either.
A film doesn't have an unlimited time to make a first impression. By the time a third of the 150 minutes had passed by, the film needed to have laid some sort of hook in me to make me care about what was going to happen in the next 100 minutes. But there's no hook; and I didn't care; and I came away from The Magnificent Ambersons with no sense of having seen anything worthwhile.
Video
The Magnificent Ambersons is presented in a 1.33:1 transfer that appears to represent the original aspect ratio of the production. I was prepared to be slightly forgiving of the transfer's flaws, until I realized that it was made in 2002... not the late 1970s, as the appearance of the image would suggest. I was, in a word, shocked.
Colors are extremely uneven. One scene might appear with an orangey overtone, while the next would be highly washed-out and grayish. Skin tones probably suffer the most, ranging from an unhealthy red to an sickly-looking pallor. The cinematography doesn't help much in this regard either, as the scenes are visually rather monotonous, with the characters dressed in gray, white, or black in rooms that have no particular color scheme or life to them.
Apart from the color issue, the transfer has other problems. Contrast is very poor, with dark scenes reducing characters to black silhouettes, and there's a fair amount of noise and edge enhancement present throughout the image. All in all, I am very surprised at the poor quality for a transfer of a very recent production.
Audio
The sound quality of The Magnificent Ambersons is at least passable, with the Dolby 2.0 track providing an adequate format for the dialogue and minor background music. It doesn't have any particular fullness to it, but it's clear and appears free of distortion or background noise.
xtras
Apart from a selection of cast bios, the DVD of The Magnificent Ambersons includes a 21-minute promotional-style making-of featurette that may be of mild interest to fans of the movie.
Final thoughts
A remake of Orson Welles' 1941 original film, the 2002 production of The Magnificent Ambersons uses Welles' original script, and includes scenes that were cut from the 1941 version of the film. As I have not seen the 1941 film, or read the novel by Booth Tarkinson that the films are based on, I had to judge the quality of the story solely on what was presented to me in the 2002 version. Alas, I am not impressed, and I suggest that viewers skip this uninteresting DVD.
Watching The Magnificent Ambersons left me profoundly unmoved and uninterested. But why, when in comparison I'd been totally swept away by an apparently very similar production, The Forsyte Saga? That's the crucial question... and one that's remarkably hard to pin down.
The Magnificent Ambersons chronicles the story of the Amberson family, a wealthy family in the midwestern United States at the turn of the century. Like other period pieces, it relies to a certain extent on costuming and decoration to set the tone of the film and to provide a context for the character drama that unfolds.
One key failure of The Magnificent Ambersons is that one of its important characters is thoroughly unlikable. And the character of George Amberson Minafer (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is indeed unlikable. He's neither an "anti-hero" nor a flawed but interesting figure: he's a egotistical, rude, unpleasant young man with no apparent redeeming qualities. In the first scenes we see him in, he dashes into a kind of romance with young Lucy Morgan (Gretchen Mol), though this relationship appears to happen by dictate of the plot rather than naturally arising from the characters. After a while, long enough to decide that this young man is nobody I'm interested in knowing more about, the film flashes back to his childhood. Guess what? He is revealed to have been an egotistical, spoiled, rude, and generally unpleasant person from the very beginning. How this is supposed to make us care about him as a character is unclear indeed, and in fact I actively disliked him throughout the film.
If the character of George is enough to put a bad flavor on the film, what about the other characters? The Magnificent Ambersons appears to be presenting an ensemble cast, so perhaps the other actors can take up the slack. Unfortunately, this does not turn out to be the case. The opening scene of the film is a fancy ball, in which we are introduced to a very large number of characters all in a rush. Which ones are the important ones? It's unclear. Similarly unclear are the relationships between the characters; the film attempts to have dramatic moments between the various people from the very beginning, but it all falls flat: if we don't know who they are, and have no reason to care about them, it really doesn't matter who they're dancing with or who was whose former suitor. As with the character of George, a set of flashbacks apparently tries to lay the groundwork of characterization for his mother Isabel (Madeleine Stowe) and her one-time suitor Eugene Morgan (Bruce Greenwood), but somehow it just doesn't work. I didn't care about the characters in the film's present storyline, and I didn't care about how they got there, either.
A film doesn't have an unlimited time to make a first impression. By the time a third of the 150 minutes had passed by, the film needed to have laid some sort of hook in me to make me care about what was going to happen in the next 100 minutes. But there's no hook; and I didn't care; and I came away from The Magnificent Ambersons with no sense of having seen anything worthwhile.
Video
The Magnificent Ambersons is presented in a 1.33:1 transfer that appears to represent the original aspect ratio of the production. I was prepared to be slightly forgiving of the transfer's flaws, until I realized that it was made in 2002... not the late 1970s, as the appearance of the image would suggest. I was, in a word, shocked.
Colors are extremely uneven. One scene might appear with an orangey overtone, while the next would be highly washed-out and grayish. Skin tones probably suffer the most, ranging from an unhealthy red to an sickly-looking pallor. The cinematography doesn't help much in this regard either, as the scenes are visually rather monotonous, with the characters dressed in gray, white, or black in rooms that have no particular color scheme or life to them.
Apart from the color issue, the transfer has other problems. Contrast is very poor, with dark scenes reducing characters to black silhouettes, and there's a fair amount of noise and edge enhancement present throughout the image. All in all, I am very surprised at the poor quality for a transfer of a very recent production.
Audio
The sound quality of The Magnificent Ambersons is at least passable, with the Dolby 2.0 track providing an adequate format for the dialogue and minor background music. It doesn't have any particular fullness to it, but it's clear and appears free of distortion or background noise.
xtras
Apart from a selection of cast bios, the DVD of The Magnificent Ambersons includes a 21-minute promotional-style making-of featurette that may be of mild interest to fans of the movie.
Final thoughts
A remake of Orson Welles' 1941 original film, the 2002 production of The Magnificent Ambersons uses Welles' original script, and includes scenes that were cut from the 1941 version of the film. As I have not seen the 1941 film, or read the novel by Booth Tarkinson that the films are based on, I had to judge the quality of the story solely on what was presented to me in the 2002 version. Alas, I am not impressed, and I suggest that viewers skip this uninteresting DVD.
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