A Separate Peace is a novel many of us read (i.e. "were required to read") in high school, and I suppose our appreciation of any cinematic rendering may be colored by that recollection. If the book spoke to you, then you'd probably have some fond memories of it. If not, well, you probably wouldn't be watching this video. Or reading this review.
Yeah, I get it. Rendering a story that's told primarily through internal monologue is a tricky thing to transfer to the screen, nevertheless it is possible. All it takes is a little creativity and thought, foreign concepts to the filmmakers here, apparently. I have not seen the previous cinematic treatment of this novel, which here in IMDB also gets a pretty low rating.
Thus, whether it succeeds better than this one or not, I couldn't say.
I can say that a story that carried some serious emotional weight in print was presented here as something that I frankly couldn't give a crap about. The characters come as close to disappearing into the background as any I've ever witnessed, and someone really should tell these actors (and I use the term loosely) that acting involves more than simply reciting some words. Even the climactic scene, where the depth of Gene's betrayal is finally presented to Phineas in a way that he could no longer deny became a "so what?" moment, so denatured it was. Honestly, I couldn't have cared less. Oh dear. Leper went crazy in combat. Oh dear. Finny died during the resetting of his second fracture. Had I seen something similar in a theater - without any foreknowledge of the plot - I probably would have forgotten those pivotal moments before I got as far as the sidewalk.
These characters were presented with vividness and depth in the novel. On screen, they're tiresomely one-dimensional and you learn almost nothing about them, certainly nothing that wasn't laboriously and clumsily spelled out in the stunningly lame dialog.
Ah well. One good thing about this film was that it made me want to re-read the story.
Yeah, I get it. Rendering a story that's told primarily through internal monologue is a tricky thing to transfer to the screen, nevertheless it is possible. All it takes is a little creativity and thought, foreign concepts to the filmmakers here, apparently. I have not seen the previous cinematic treatment of this novel, which here in IMDB also gets a pretty low rating.
Thus, whether it succeeds better than this one or not, I couldn't say.
I can say that a story that carried some serious emotional weight in print was presented here as something that I frankly couldn't give a crap about. The characters come as close to disappearing into the background as any I've ever witnessed, and someone really should tell these actors (and I use the term loosely) that acting involves more than simply reciting some words. Even the climactic scene, where the depth of Gene's betrayal is finally presented to Phineas in a way that he could no longer deny became a "so what?" moment, so denatured it was. Honestly, I couldn't have cared less. Oh dear. Leper went crazy in combat. Oh dear. Finny died during the resetting of his second fracture. Had I seen something similar in a theater - without any foreknowledge of the plot - I probably would have forgotten those pivotal moments before I got as far as the sidewalk.
These characters were presented with vividness and depth in the novel. On screen, they're tiresomely one-dimensional and you learn almost nothing about them, certainly nothing that wasn't laboriously and clumsily spelled out in the stunningly lame dialog.
Ah well. One good thing about this film was that it made me want to re-read the story.