O Mistério de Agatha

Michael Apted created a truly beautiful movie in this period piece. Watching it was an exercise in restraint, beauty, and remarkable taste, each frame seemingly more beautiful than the next. Again, Ms. Redgrave delivers a nuanced but powerful portrayal of this equally powerful mystery writer, who's real life disappearance was thoughtfully imagined in this thought-provoking film. Perhaps the choice of Dustin Hoffman was a bit of a stretch, when his physical height often seemed a little incongruous combined with the extreme height of the statuesque Redgrave, especially during the single love scene. That said, Hoffman's performance was more than up for the task, revealing a degree of stoic steadfastness and street smarts that makes the entire enterprise move along quite well, in spite of its generally slower pace, which English films generally employ to good effect. Never having heard of or seen this film before, catching it on TCM was an interesting and captivating delight.

The title of this English movie refers to one of the world's most famous writer, Agatha Christie, who, in 1926, left her home without warning and created a public speculation about her fate. The director, Michael Apted, gives us a great amount of solemnity, using it to balance with the most trivial of human behaviors. Dustin Hoffman is rather theatrical in his portrayal of a famous journalist that falls in love with the fragile and dependent writer and Vanessa Redgrave captures perfectly the loss and solitude of the character. And suddenly, when the movie itself was imbued in its quietness, becomes something close to a thriller, a race against time, and its cleverness never compensates the unexpected loss. But it is a beautiful film, carefully constructed and with some good dialogue. Victorio Storaro's cinematography is excellent as usual and Timothy Dalton probably gives his finest performance as a rigid and paternal husband who doesn't allow his wife to act as one. "Would you care for a kiss?", asks Agatha. I would say yes, but only to this Agatha .

Fie on all adulterers!!!! Vanessa makes you feel her pain as she is rejected by her handsome cold husband and then subjected to his lies about his new mistress. We follow her thought processes, so good is her acting, as she mulls over suicide and the various ways it may be accomplished. Her masochistic love for this man is hard to believe, unless you've been caught up in the spell of a @#$$^$*%()_ , know what I mean? She certainly doesn't need him, financially.

Anyway, Dustin Hoffman comes along playing a hard-eyed, confident newspaper man, quite against type. He meets the wealthy owner of the paper he's stringing for eye to eye with great firmness. The way he brings another reporter into some high faluting meeting place over the snobbish insults of the wait-staff is a beautiful and subtle thing to watch.

I of course enjoyed all the English scenery at Bath, England at the old hotel there meant for folks in the old days to take different 'cures'. Of course, we're talking the idle rich here, and it was rather fascinating since we have our own Warm Springs, also used for similar type cures during the 30s and 40s.

Buy the movie for your big screen TV, and back it up with some Merchant Ivory for a great evening of hoighty-toighty England.

In 1926, when her marriage with a stiff colonel has run down, Agatha Christie mysteriously vanishes. In the middle of both police and public investigation after the famous writer, an American journalist finds her in a Harrogate spa-hotel where, under a pseudonym, she prepares an elaborate revenge against her husband's lover.

Straightly fictitious solution to a famous and still unsolved real-life disappearance, with more attention to gleaming period detail and chillingly murky atmosphere than to suspense or credibility, while Redgrave's finely sensible portrait is downed by the somewhat strained and out-of-place casting of Hoffman as love interest. Eventually, this glossily romantic thriller has its own fascinations and is always well worth looking at, but the mystery is simply not as startling or revealing as one would expect from the Grande Dame of whodunit.

It's a famous real life case. Agatha Christie disappeared for 11 days in December 1926. For some, she never explained it convincingly and this is a fictional account of those days. Col. Archibald Christie (Timothy Dalton) asks his wife Agatha Christie (Vanessa Redgrave) for a divorce so that he can marry his secretary Nancy Neele. Agatha is under tremendous stress and desperate to keep her husband. When American reporter Wally Stanton (Dustin Hoffman) arrives at her doors for a scheduled interview, the colonel sends him away. Agatha's abandoned car is later found and the search is on.

The fictionalization gives the scriptwriter a blank slate. It could have gone a million different ways from the outlandish to the poignant. This doesn't do much of anything and that is the most disappointing aspect. I don't care about Stanton or the Colonel or the search. I would love to follow only Agatha but she just spends her time at a spa. It's probably the least intriguing destination although it's fun to have her do research during her stay. I don't find her budding relationship with Stanton based on mutual lies that compelling. Despite the great acting power available, it's not until well into the second half before something interesting happens.