A Yorkshire police inspector's daughter is shot by a mysterious figure and dies in her dad's arms. Bob Peck spends the rest of the movie figuring out who killed her and why -- and he never shoots anybody. This stands in stark contrast to the Hollywood remake, in which the daughter's death merely provides an excuse for Mel Gibson to shoot everybody who looks at him cross eyed. This is the vastly better TV miniseries that provided the source for the remake.
And yet it's hard to evaluate. The story is contemporary and powerful. The inspector's daughter was a member of an organization called Gaia, after the Greek's earth goddess. She was investigating a supposedly abandoned storage facility for useless nuclear waste. (I'm going to try not to give too much of the plot away.) There's more too it than that, of course, and it takes Peck the entire four hours or so to bring the narrative to a conclusion, and a costly and ambiguous one at that.
There were a couple of bothersome features in the production though. I suppose it's difficult to lighten a story of a man grieving over the murder of his only relative. But that still leaves a lot of lugubrious close up of Peck's mournful face. The only time he seems to lose his melancholy is, sometimes, in the presence of the cheerfully antinomian CIA agent played by Joe Don Baker, whose bulk and flab add some materiality to the images. I perked up, too, when Allan Cutherbertson was on the screen, although I wish he were still ginger instead of gray. Eric Clapton, whom I admire very much both as a musician and a man, wrote a score that adds little to the film.
Another problem may be attributed to my own ignorance of those bureaucratic entities. There seem to be an enormous number of them and I lost count of who was who. Let's see. There is the Northern Police in Yorkshire, for which Peck works. Then there's the Metropolitan Police in London, somewhat at odds with the other. Then there's Scotland Yard. Then there's a special branch that reports directly to the PM, a shadowy force. Then the CIA. And those are just the agents of social control.
Among the civilians, or quasi-civilians, there is an Irish prisoner who works for somebody, a union whose boss is treacherous, and finally the corporation that wants to buy the nuclear storage facility with the goal of harnessing the power of the universe to destroy enemy missiles before they can leave their silos and then establish a "solar empire" led by "the United States of America -- and its allies." The corporation is called something like The Kansas Nuclear Fusion, Barbecue, and Car Wash Corporation.
For the middle two hours of this four-hour presentation I was thoroughly befuddled by the individuals representing these organizations and by the valences and goals of the organizations themselves. I didn't know who was following whom, or why.
From time to time Peck hallucinates conversations with his now-dead daughter (Whaley) and in the last one she tells him that even if man destroys himself the planet will survive. Black flowers will grow, and they'll absorb the sun's heat and melt the polar ice caps and the earth will be watered and flourish again. (Something like that.)
When Peck and Baker are having their last conversation -- both drunk and dying by degrees -- Baker airily dismisses the argument and tells a story about seeing Russian soldiers in Afghanistan eating black flowers, from which he draws the conclusion that man will destroy himself and the planet along with him. I told you the story was powerful. But the last shot is of the snow-patched shore of a Scottish lake and we see black flowers shivering in the wind. So I guess the earth wins -- maybe. Or, as Ernest Hemingway said, "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?"
And yet it's hard to evaluate. The story is contemporary and powerful. The inspector's daughter was a member of an organization called Gaia, after the Greek's earth goddess. She was investigating a supposedly abandoned storage facility for useless nuclear waste. (I'm going to try not to give too much of the plot away.) There's more too it than that, of course, and it takes Peck the entire four hours or so to bring the narrative to a conclusion, and a costly and ambiguous one at that.
There were a couple of bothersome features in the production though. I suppose it's difficult to lighten a story of a man grieving over the murder of his only relative. But that still leaves a lot of lugubrious close up of Peck's mournful face. The only time he seems to lose his melancholy is, sometimes, in the presence of the cheerfully antinomian CIA agent played by Joe Don Baker, whose bulk and flab add some materiality to the images. I perked up, too, when Allan Cutherbertson was on the screen, although I wish he were still ginger instead of gray. Eric Clapton, whom I admire very much both as a musician and a man, wrote a score that adds little to the film.
Another problem may be attributed to my own ignorance of those bureaucratic entities. There seem to be an enormous number of them and I lost count of who was who. Let's see. There is the Northern Police in Yorkshire, for which Peck works. Then there's the Metropolitan Police in London, somewhat at odds with the other. Then there's Scotland Yard. Then there's a special branch that reports directly to the PM, a shadowy force. Then the CIA. And those are just the agents of social control.
Among the civilians, or quasi-civilians, there is an Irish prisoner who works for somebody, a union whose boss is treacherous, and finally the corporation that wants to buy the nuclear storage facility with the goal of harnessing the power of the universe to destroy enemy missiles before they can leave their silos and then establish a "solar empire" led by "the United States of America -- and its allies." The corporation is called something like The Kansas Nuclear Fusion, Barbecue, and Car Wash Corporation.
For the middle two hours of this four-hour presentation I was thoroughly befuddled by the individuals representing these organizations and by the valences and goals of the organizations themselves. I didn't know who was following whom, or why.
From time to time Peck hallucinates conversations with his now-dead daughter (Whaley) and in the last one she tells him that even if man destroys himself the planet will survive. Black flowers will grow, and they'll absorb the sun's heat and melt the polar ice caps and the earth will be watered and flourish again. (Something like that.)
When Peck and Baker are having their last conversation -- both drunk and dying by degrees -- Baker airily dismisses the argument and tells a story about seeing Russian soldiers in Afghanistan eating black flowers, from which he draws the conclusion that man will destroy himself and the planet along with him. I told you the story was powerful. But the last shot is of the snow-patched shore of a Scottish lake and we see black flowers shivering in the wind. So I guess the earth wins -- maybe. Or, as Ernest Hemingway said, "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?"