Esther Kahn

I kept hoping this dispirited young woman would bring some life not only to her own, but to mine. Alas...that never happened.

Esther Kahn, a young Jewish woman, falls inwardly in love with the theatre, strives to become an actress...but no amount of help, even from the wonderful Ian Holm as tutor, brings her out of her flat, unresponsive stupor. Why she is eventually given the lead in "Hedda Gabler" stands as the most unconvincing development I think I've ever seen in a film.

The only plus I can offer for this movie are the lovely filmic moments with intimate still life images that say more than all the rest. Life stilled to near-death. What does that add to the viewers experience? Nothing in the evidence given accounts for her early alienation and therefore we can't truly go with it.

Boring and appallingly acted(Summer Pheonix). She sounded more Asian than Jewish. Some of the scenes and costumes looked more mid 20th century than late 19th century. What on earth fine actors like Ian Holm & Anton Lesser were doing in this is beyond me.

This is an extremely dense, somber, and complicated film that unravels quite slowly, revealing excruciating detail, like the attention paid in a novel, and watching this film "IS" like watching a novel unfold. While I didn't care for the narrator, as I felt he was out of balance with the rest of the performances, this film features some of the best ensemble acting I have ever seen, and the lead, Summer Phoenix, is fabulous. Her innocence and naivete some might find implausible, sort of a cross between Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland. I can buy that critique, but she's still fabulous, partially because she's unlike anything I've ever seen before.

This film is unbelievably beautiful, filmed by Eric Gautier, and part of what is so unique about this film is how it doesn't ever show what you'd expect. It's always surprising, and despite it's length, the film never reveals more than it needs to. At 163 minutes, it's extremely concise, to a fault, I'd say, which is one of the wonders of this film. It's filled with brief moments which are simply stunning, some of the best you're likely to see all year, and all these moments add up in the end to an extraordinary film experience. The family moments are unique, Ian Holm is brilliant, and what this film has to say about the theater hasn't been seen in films since Cassavetes' "Opening Night," or perhaps Chaplin's "Limelight." But, believe it or not, this film is much "less" conventional. I never knew where this film was going, and now, having seen it, it still has multiple possibilities. This is a powerful, incredibly provocative film.

Sleepwalking, dead, boring, an endurance test for the audience - all have been said before so why am I adding to the comments I agree with? There is this:

"...it isn't before a man treats her badly that she realizes on stage, that she has talent and that she connects with the audience and emerges as a stronger human being."

This must be the reviewer's imagination talking. One can tell that this is the point of the movie that its makers are trying to make but they failed. Utterly. The only reason I kept it going in the machine was to see if they could redeem themselves. But they did not. It's a very big disappointment. There is no connection with the audience - either in the theater's audience inside the story itself or the movie audience watching this.

Too many close-ups, just way too many. I'd call it possibly a workshop on close-ups - if you're in the business. Otherwise, why waste money on this? It's just pointless.

"the film never reveals more than it needs to."

Honestly, it reveals nothing.

And yes, why was so much money thrown at this movie? I seriously wonder if the backers needed to lose money for tax purposes.

The point of the vastly extended preparatory phase of this Star is Born story seems to be to make ultimate success all the more sublime. Summer Phoenix is very effective as an inarticulate young woman imprisoned within herself but never convincing as the stage actress of growing fame who both overcomes and profits from this detachment. Even in the lengthy scenes of Esther's acting lessons, we never see her carry out the teacher's instructions. After suffering through Esther's (largely self-inflicted) pain in excruciating detail, we are given no persuasive sense of her triumph.

The obsessive presence of the heroine's pain seems to be meant as a guarantee of aesthetic transcendence. Yet the causes of this pain (poverty, quasi-autism, Judaism, sexual betrayal) never come together in a coherent whole. A 163-minute film with a simple plot should be able to knit up its loose ends. Esther Kahn is still not ready to go before an audience.