Birdsong

Although there was a lot left out of the original book, the storytelling in this TV miniseries was beautiful. I have been loving Eddie Redmayne for a while now, but after this film, I'm hooked! I am in love with him as was Isabelle. :) I loved the actress who played her as well. She reminded me of young Juliette Binoche. I thought it was a passionate and beautifully told story. The cinematography was spectacular and the massive destruction that WWII left was very well depicted here. More films should show how the Wealthy Upper classes acted as the Generals who would order the lower classes to put themselves on the frontlines basically for suicide missions to keep everyone else in good standing, including those who sat around thinking up brilliant ideas to have innocent young soldiers killed.

Just beautiful

Tugs at your heart from the opening scenes till the last, with some lovely performances from Posey, Madden & Croze amongst many

Led by a tortured Eddie Redmayne brilliantly supported by the under rated Joseph Mawle

I read the book Birdsong (the basis for this series) by Sebastian Faulks many years ago and really enjoyed it, particularly the sections about life in the trenches, which I found very gripping and evocative. Perhaps my memory is playing up, but I seemed to remember that this was the main point of the book, not the romance between Stephen and his french girlfriend, which was the main focus of this disappointing adaptation.

I am amazed how the production team managed to turn such a good book about WW1 into such a dull and plodding romantic drama. The dialogue was stilted, and although I am English and therefore used to the various English dialects, I struggled most of the time to understand what was being said so had to turn the volume up higher than normal. The acting was also poor - involving lots of staring mournfully at each other and simpering. I'm not sure if this was the actors' / director's faults or whether it was such a bad script that there was just no dialogue to work with. I've never watched a drama with so many long silences in it (except maybe the Twilight films); I'm sure this wasn't a feature of the book. I found myself getting very frustrated with the slow pace and kept wanting to reach for the FF button on the remote. I also found the casting of several of the characters very odd - especially the normally excellent Matthew Goode and Eddie Redmayne.

The one redeeming feature of the series was that it looked good.

In summary then, one to avoid and read the book instead.

I rarely review unless I love a movie and feel something has been unfairly rated due to some anomaly. Here I suspect the anomaly is that it will only be fully felt by people who have known something of this these level of intensity of love and death. Our world has become somewhat numbed to these things. I am lucky and unlucky enough to have had a meeting just like theirs and the story and intensity of it touched me very deeply. It is not just a matter of being open enough for these things to happen, but open enough to recognize their significance. And even in the absence of a war, for such a spiritual heart, as in the Bhagavad Gita, life will always be trench warfare on some level.

First of all, BIRDSONG is beautifully filmed and acted. Joseph Mawle is especially memorable as Jack Firebrace--who I quote in my title here--a friend and sort of foil character to the protagonist (Stephen Wraysford) played by Eddie Redmayne. Agree: American audiences may find all the British brogues a bit hard to follow without the subtitles.

While there is a palpable storyline and a good surprise at the end, BIRDSONG appeals more to the heart than to the head. It's quite a sad story, of course, but it avoids going too far in the direction of melodrama. It successfully incorporates some really huge themes: Love, forgiveness, loyalty, and others. There is also a great deal of WWI battle footage: BIRDSONG will probably appeal to most war film aficionados. Warning: Some really graphic scenes of carnage at the Somme and various other battles.

Part I shifts every few minutes from Wraysford's illicit 1910 love affair with the wife of a French business partner to his service in the British army between 1916-18. The two time settings are extremely well-synchronized: The directors and producers did a fine job of making the two stories into one. Part II, though it follows the same general pattern, is a little more of a straightforward, solidified story.

I haven't read Sebastian Faulks's original novel, but I've heard nothing but good things about it. It's probably a hard book to cinematize, but Masterpiece Theater did about the best job possible here.