Das Geisterhaus

this film has spirit, hope and courage. a love story spanning three generations, dealing with mystic experiences, cruel ambition and selfless devotion. wonderfully moving performances by entire cast. irons plays a powerful fool who's lost his humanity, but not his desire to love. streep is wonderful as a woman who is a bridge between life and spirit. close is moving as a woman who denied her own desires tending first her mother, then her brother. rider blossoms with courage and passion for banderas who is fine as revolutionist. do not attempt to watch this film--feel it, experience it, open your heart to it's romantic and passionate tale. allow it charm you and take you back to timeless story telling of hope and disappointment and cruel injustice and forgiveness. it's clear that this piece is a collective gift of love from all involved to all whom are willing to be transported to romance, to spiritual connections, to love strong enough to reach beyond death.

I've never been a fan of Bille August, and this film has only furthered my opinion of his work. I found the directing, as well as the editing, choppy and incoherent. Mr. August tried too hard to be mystical and discreet in his telling of the tale--to the point of being annoyingly aloof and superficial.

The take-home message is, however, refreshing in its complexity and layers. The events all seem to come full circle and continue through the generations of the family, as Clara verbalized in her diaries, "the relationships between events." Lende's message was that evil begets evil, and nothing good came from malice. Such is sadly noted upon reflection that many misfortunes stemmed from poor judgment, and unacknowledged or unrectified wrongdoings in the past.

I thought the characters Farula and Esteban were the best-written and the best-acted, by far. Glenn Close exuded every bit of the torn and love-deprived spinster sister, her very gaze a window to her harsh and barren life. Jeremy Irons' portrayal of the dark and contradictory Esteban was brazen yet vulnerable, between his political persona and love for his wife.

This is the story Esteban, a man who gain land and fortune through hard work. He only wishes for a loving family that have what he did not when he was a child. His conservative ways adds to that struggle and creates conflict with his family. This conflict grows when one of his low-class workers falls in love with his daughter. The military coup of 1973 to bring communism down in Chile is shown.

This film represents what it is to live in Chile. I have never seen any film that tells the culture and the people of the southern South-America better. Most people makes the mistake to think that people in Chile and Argentina are not white. The whole cast represents EXACTLY what chileans look like and the difference between the higher and lower class. You can learn a lot from this film.

This movie is 110% recommended. It may have some differences with the book but it is respectful to it. Excellent camera and direction work at a spectacular location.

The book was fabulous and remains one of my favorites. The movie, for some reason reminded me of "The Thorn Birds"--I guess because I felt so much was left out, and it would have been better as a mini-series.

The book evokes a much more magical, mythical, and "Spirit"-ual feeling that reflects the special flavor of life in South America, especially with Clara having green hair, and more powers in the book. A lot of that feeling is left out of the movie.

However, the movie mostly makes up for this lack in the extremely vivid presentation of the characters' emotions.

The first time I saw THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS, I had a similar reaction to what most critics seemed to have. I felt the movie was bad, but couldn't say why exactly. It's hard to find fault in a movie with such an esteemed cast, such great sets and cinematography, etc. I knew it was based on a famous novel, so I figured the problem must have been in the adaptation.

Upon reading the novel and then going back to the film, I realized something interesting: the film starts out as a faithful adaptation before losing its way, but the biggest issue is the tone.

The novel's style of magical realism is, right from the start, difficult to adapt to film. There's green hair, there's magic remedies, and there's a very darkly humorous tone. The film on the other hand is very bleak and brooding, with only some slight supernatural element, which is kind of shrugged off. Roger Ebert, who always has a perfect way of articulating the best criticism, worded it best: "Magic realism, which informs so many South American stories, is treated here as a slightly embarrassing social gaffe, like passing wind. Clara's gifts are not made integral to the story; the filmmakers see them more as ornamentation." For example, in the book, Severo and Nivea die in a car accident and Clara keeps her mother's decapitated head in the basement. Years later, when Clara dies, Esteban tells his servants "Well, we might as well bury my mother-in-law's head now." Moments like that are missing, and instead we just have a scene of Severo and Nivea in a random car accident in the film, and are then never mentioned again. Why even bother having the car accident at all? And why waste Vanessa Redgrave in such a small role?

Now this leads into another issue: the most infamous criticism of this film is that it stars a bunch of "gringos" (Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, and Winona Ryder) as Chilean characters. At first glance, you might think this is a shallow thing to criticize: actors play characters of different ethnic backgrounds all the time, nor is there any one way that a Chilean person should "look." But I think this criticism is actually a misdiagnosis of a bigger problem. The problem isn't that these actors are all Anglo; it's the fact that they play their characters in a very Anglicized way for an Anglo audience. They mispronounce names like Tres Marias ("Trays Muh-ree-ahs") and Esteban ("Estuh-baan") and say them all as if these names are foreign to them. Irons, who is British, sounds American while Close, who is American, sounds British. Winona Ryder's character is presented as an all-American girl. There's even a scene towards the end, while Blanca is being tortured and Alba waits for her at home, where Alba is eating out a Kentucky Fried Chicken box in the 1970's! (KFC didn't start opening stores in Chile until 1992. Yes, I actually looked it up out of curiosity). Now you might say "Who cares if they show a KFC box? That's nitpicking." It might not seem important, but on a subtextual level, it's significant. The filmmakers are trying to dilute the Hispanism of the story and create the mindset that this could easily be happening in the US. All of this adds a feeling of displacement to the movie. Because it loses its Chilean and Latino identity, the politics lose their context. What is the coup at the end all about? Why does it happen? What happened to the workers at Tres Marias? Why was Pedro III an enemy of the military's?

When you take this story, remove its Hispanic context and magic realism, what you're left with is just a domestic drama, which is less interesting than its book counterpart when it is simplified. The adaptation's biggest change is the removal of an entire generation and combining Blanca and Alba into one character. This completely changes the third act and it now makes no sense for Esteban to help Pedro III escape. In the book, Esteban joins forces with Miguel as they both care about saving Alba. In the film's version, joining forces with Pedro III will in no way have any affect on saving Blanca. The impact of Esteban's relationship with Alba is also lost as she is reduced to only a small child in the film and not given much character. In the book, Esteban has affairs with multiple women at Tres Marias and fathers many children, which everyone is aware of. In the film, he just randomly commits violent rape one day in a very abrupt scene, and then completely forgets about it until a son shows up one day. Because of the removal of an entire generation, Esteban III in the book is Esteban II in the film, and his character is given the Hollywood archetypes of a perverse and disturbed villain rather than as the symbol of lineage of violence he was in the book. In addition to this you have the removal of Blanca's brothers from the book and a climax that doesn't play very dramatically, and the resulting story is very fractured and loses the epic 3-generation sweep of the novel.

I am left wondering if any film could have been made of this book, which has so many characters and spans many different episodes. Regardless, this film, and its serious tone, do not suit the book at all, and just leaves audiences wondering what the story they just saw was all about.