A touching,gentle movie,The Browning Version is perhaps hugely under-rated.
The simple tale of an aging school teacher forced into retirement actually contains many poetic metaphors for struggle.Crocker-Harris finds himself at one of life's great crossroads and wrestles with the inner turmoil of the knowledge that his life-work may have been futile.His convictions about language and literature are to be swept aside with the arrival of his successor and his still-beautiful wife,sympathetically played by Greta Scaachi,is as distant as his pupils.
Finney plays this role with a calm and measure that is evidence of a great actor at work.Perhaps only Hopkins could have hoped to have done so well with this role.
The score is excellent and the cinematography elegant.A great "English" film in every sense;my only wish is that it might have been a little longer.Somehow,an epic running time may have yielded the acclaim that it justly deserved.
