Both portentous and perfunctory, 'Eden' ought to have important things to say about the origins of Israel, the failure of idealism and so forth, but someone has not done the necessary work. The opening sequence sets the tone: a long, long sequence of people building walls with cement bricks, very slowly, arduously and apparently without much skill. Though beautifully acted (especially by Samantha Morton) and photographed, the whole movie is a bit like that. There are huge absences where a script should be. Very long, slow scenes can release a lot of power - Tarkovsky is the shining example, but something actually happens in his endless shots. There are scenes in this film in which the director seems simply to have neglected to tell the actors what to do: a motorcycle drives into shot, turns round and drives out again; the heroine visits the building site and, after some considerable time, has a little interaction with a labourer, and they do a bit of business with some stones which makes no sense and merely looks made up on the spot. They seem to be waiting for the director to call `cut'. And so are we. The film is so slow and so hollow - despite its large 'themes' - that the audience is reduced to asking what ought to be trivial questions: why is the heroine so obviously English when the rest of her family are American? Why do the father and son hold all their conversations with one looking over the other's shoulder? Why would a strong-minded woman, sitting in a parked car, keep saying `Let me out! Let me out!' instead of just opening the door? Why did not Arthur Miller, who wrote the original story, not notice that some of the dialogue was literally unspeakable, when he was the one who had to speak it? Why are pretentious movies always full of Mahler? Is that man going to read the whole of Gropius' diaries aloud? Will this never end?
