This is one of those movies that belongs in a special category: Films Worth Watching for Exactly One or Two Scenes.
Really, it's crazy. Other than these two scenes, the movie is mediocre, with Gwyneth Paltrow's great beauty the best thing about it.
But these two scenes! It's as if they are from another movie entirely, a movie you saw as a child and never forgot, a movie that shaped your adult love life.
If only the rest of the film around these two scenes were equally as good.
Here are the scenes: a man and a woman, deeply in love with each other, delay kissing, for the moment is not yet ripe. They spend time together, including collecting shells along the seashore.
Finally, one candle-lit night at dinner, the woman, radiating the original Earth Goddess, smiles at the man, and that smile communicates all. He knows that this is the night. He follows her to her bedroom, where she has positioned herself -- gracefully, beautifully, sensually -- in readiness for him. His hands shake...
Second scene: a man meets a little girl, and in that meeting comes to understand deep heartaches of his life in a whole new way.
And ... those scenes are reason enough to see this movie. Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle are superb; the costumes are gorgeous; the lighting is perfect ...
And then you have the rest of the movie. Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart play two modern scholars studying the lives of the characters played by the aforementioned, excellent, Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle.
Paltrow is terrific, everything the script calls for.
Aaron Eckhart ... was really good in "Company of Men." Here he just isn't enough. When Paltrow kisses him, and attempts to display passion, you are certain: she'd never go for this guy. She could get someone so much better, and she will.
The script makes Eckhart's character out to be something of a boy-man. Eckhart plays him with perpetually greasy hair and unshaved face. he wears the same clothes everyday. And he's something of a nothing.
But Northam and Ehle, and their story ... for the ages.
