The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: A tasty treat

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018) • View trailer 

Four stars. Rated TV-14, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.28.20

Films with excessively long titles generally should be regarded with suspicion.

 

As two classic examples, nothing can be gained from watching 1962’s The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? or 1967’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad.

 

As the members of the Guernsey book club watch with varying degrees of amusement —
from left, Isola (Katherine Parkinson), Eben (Tom Courtenay), young Eli (Kit Connor),
Amelia (Penelope Wilton) and Dawsey (Michiel Huisman) — Juliet (Lily James, far
right) bravely agrees to taste the infamous potato peel pie.

Happily, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society — exclusive to Netflix — is an entirely different creature: a solid British charmer from director Mike Newell, who brought us Enchanted April, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Mona Lisa Smile. Scripters Don Roos, Kevin Hood and Thomas Bezucha have fashioned a solid adaptation of the best-selling 2008 book by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows: not an easy task, given that it’s an epistolary novel, composed entirely of letters written between characters.

 

(Actually, the book’s creation is a fascinating story unto itself; curious souls are encouraged to research how Shaffer came to write it … but was unable to finish it.)

 

We meet author Juliet Ashton (Lily James) midway through a cross-country tour to promote her newest book; the setting is 1946, in a post-war England just beginning to rebuild itself. She is accompanied by publisher and best friend Sidney Stark (Matthew Goode), a solicitous fellow with the good-natured patience to tolerate his favorite writer’s occasional whims.

 

Such as her impulsive decision, following the exchange of a few letters, to visit the island community of Guernsey. Her curiosity is piqued by a farmer named Dawsey Adams (Michiel Huisman), who mentions belonging to a local book club dubbed, yes, the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

 

Her departure displeases dashing American GI Mark Reynolds (Glen Powell), whose proposal she has just accepted (too rashly, we suspect). Even so, he graciously agrees to await her return.

 

Juliet’s arrival in Guernsey is greeted with enthusiasm by Dawsey and the other book club members: Eben Ramsey (Tom Courtenay), Amelia Maugery (Penelope Wilton) and Isola Pribby (Katherine Parkinson). Juliet soon learns that the “Society” was concocted during the early days of Guernsey’s German occupation, as a fabricated justification for breaking curfew (briefly revealed in a flashback prologue).

 

Needing to maintain the charade in order to satisfy a Nazi chaperone, the Society continued to meet on a regular basis. Even after their “minder” grew bored and stopped attending, the group realized how much they valued a book’s ability to whisk them away from what had become a bleak and brutal existence.

 

The Age of Adaline: Refuses to grow up

The Age of Adaline (2015) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated PG-13, and much too harshly, for a single suggestive comment
By Derrick Bang

I’m a sucker for romantic fantasies.

I may be the only person in the country who fell under the spell of last year’s Winter’s Tale, which remains woefully under-appreciated. Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan still work their magic during the fourth (fifth?) viewing of 1998’s City of Angels, and the 2009 adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife — although not perfect — captivates nonetheless.

Despite decades of cautious, low-profile activity that has kept her safe, and out of public
view, Adaline (Blake Lively) allows herself to fall in love with Ellis (Michiel Huisman),
thereby granting him tacit access to the carefully guarded details of her life. We can't
help thinking that this is unwise...

As for the 2007 adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust? Simply delightful.

All of which makes me one of the ideal target viewers for The Age of Adaline ... and, therefore, one of many doomed to disappointment.

This is an extremely difficult and delicate genre. One false step — a contrivance too many, a tone too maudlin, a tragedy too melodramatic — and the whole endeavor collapses like an improperly cooked soufflé.

Scripters J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz definitely have a clever premise here. Their execution, however, leaves much to be desired. Director Lee Toland Krieger isn’t much help either; his oeuvre centers around snarky, modern-era gender battles such as The Vicious Kind and Celeste & Jesse Forever. Krieger, apparently operating outside his comfort zone, hasn’t the faintest idea how to make this eccentric drama work.

Which is a shame, because stars Blake Lively and Michiel Huisman are very good together. Their line deliveries sparkle, the tension between them crackles, and — despite the overwhelming odds against — we genuinely want their star-crossed relationship to catch fire and endure.

But Krieger, Goodloe and Paskowitz keep getting in their own way. Every time we succumb to Lively’s melancholy charm and radiant incandescence, we’re yanked out of the moment by a particularly tin-eared line of dialogue, or another load of pseudo-medical gibberish from the off-camera narrator.

Let’s start with that narrator.

Never has a film been less in need of off-camera commentary. Apparently unable to perceive any of the gentler, more satisfying ways of conveying essential information, Goodloe and Paskowitz have their omniscient observer (Hugh Ross) bury us beneath paragraphs of laughably technical codswallop.

Perhaps they were inspired by Jim Dale’s wonderfully arch commentary throughout each episode of TV’s lamentably short-lived Pushing Daisies. Trouble is, that show’s tone is overtly whimsical and deliberately exaggerated, whereas Adaline exists in the real world. And in the real world, pedantic explanations are boring and inappropriate.