User Reviews

Thanks to watching The Graham Norton Show, in which star Juliette Binoche was amongst the guest, I found out about this movie. It should be noted though, another big draw is Maria Doyle Kennedy from Orphan Black; as well as Nikolah Coaster-Waldau from Game of Thrones. But, while two recognizable faces do sweeten the deal, the question remains: Can a movie about a war photographer get you, and keep you, interested?

Characters & Story

Rebecca (Juliette Binoche) is amongst the top 5 photographers in the world. Her photographs of varying crises are legendary. She is like a fly on the wall, becoming closely intimate with her subjects and captures every moment. Be it a young girl preparing to be a suicide bomber, or a town in Kenya about to be torn by battle, she will find a nook for herself and seek to expose the situation to the world.

However, as good as she is in observing and capturing moments, it seems her ability in participating in her own life with her family is difficult. For one, her husband Marcus (Nikolah Coaster-Waldau) is forced to be with their two daughters Steph (Lauryn Canny) and Lisa (Adrianna Cramer Curtis) on constant edge knowing any minute that an integral part of their family can be gone. Making Rebecca's career a strain on her marriage, as well as her relationship with her children. What seemingly is her grounding force.

But, with getting caught near a suicide vest blast radius, Rebecca is forced home. With this, she seems ready to end her career for between reading Steph's journal and seeing what her absence has done, watching her marriage fall apart, and realizing she is likely to miss Lisa's childhood, it seems she may be ready to sacrifice her career for her family. Then comes one assignment possibly last assignment, of which Steph joins, which changes everything. With this small taste of action once more, a difficult decision is put before Rebecca in which she almost is forced to choose between her family and her work.

Praise

When it comes to wars and crises, usually we are given the perspective of someone in the military. A brave soldier, one out of their league usually, who rises through the ranks, and so on. In this film however, we follow a photographer and deal with the uncomfortableness of her watching, often in silence, as people experience great personal horrors. Of which, creates this weird unease as we watch Binoche portray Rebecca. You can see that all these horrors have left a few scars on her mind, as well as her body, but going home is that rest.

But, with Rebecca's absence that reset button is gunky with disappointment, feelings of abandonment, and other feelings which aren't put into words, but are expressed in the glances of everyone who seemingly has developed mixed feelings upon Rebecca's return. I should note though, while Binoche certainly is the driver of this film, Canny does try to keep up. Mind you, she doesn't stand out enough to fully carve out her own little pedestal of which to be praised, but considering the family element is perhaps something which can be considered the weak point of the film, throughout, she does slide by without causing too much damage.

Criticism

Elaborating further on that critique of the family element, to me, the family element is the weakest part of the film because it not only changes the tone of the film, but feels rather weakly written in. You almost wish at times the family bits were cut out so the focus could be solely Rebecca photographing these complicated moments which she sometimes desires to interfere in. As well as watch her fight with her editors and express why she is so passionate about her work. And, to me, that would have been a far more excellent film than what we are given.

Alas, what we see, with the addition of her family, is an attempt to show the complicated side of being a woman with a career and family. But, be it my need to see a woman succeed in having it all, or just weak writing on her failing to have it all, I found myself uninterested in the family drama. If just because it seems like the same old issues with a slightly different spin. Rebecca's husband Marcus acts like he doesn't know the woman he married; the kids are your generic type of which one is naive about everything, while the other is old enough to understand what is going on, but not mature enough, well until the end of the movie, to accept their mom was a person before they came around. And the combination of this just makes the family drama seem more like an attempt to shame Rebecca, than to really tell the story of women struggling to balance having a fruitful career, while trying to have a family.

Overall: TV Viewing

While enjoyable, and arguably could work as a series, A Thousand Times Good Night can be a bit frustrating as it takes a great idea and drowns it in a simple plot. One which there could have been a better attempt at showing the difficulties of a woman pursuing a dangerous career with a family waiting at home, but instead decided to just drown us in her family making her feel guilty to the point of going insane. Hence why I say this is only worth TV Viewing. It is good, but drowns itself in overdone drama.

It's not easy to find a good list of movies about war correspondents on the web. Often they miss such action plus movies as Harrison's Flowers (2000) or The Bang Bang Club (2010), though The Killing Fields (1984) will be there. Live From Bagdad (2000) may or may not be. A Thousand Times has two sequences, each pretty short, that align the movie with those above, but that's all. Both sequences are pretty devastating and high tension. Alas, that's the only tension you'll find in this movie. This is a study of a female war correspondent's calling and how it affects her family. The major problem with the movie, no matter Juliette Binoche's capable and noble portrayal, is very early on the viewer may definitely decide not to like her. Her initial source of assignment, and her role in its consequences, strikes one very early in the piece as just plain wrong. We don't like her. Then the movie takes a very long time to get to her second assignment. She's been rehabilitated in the viewers' eyes now, but, alas, again it all comes crashing down with her dumb choices and subsequent behaviour. She's just so selfish. Then her third assignment, and, well, yet another ridiculous choice, and, for me, quite frankly, I was just glad the movie was over. It's beautifully filmed, and the little daughter is cute. A couple of years ago I saw a movie called War Story (2014), about a returned female war correspondent suffering PTSD. Strange how movie themes often come in tandem during a short time period. I wonder if that's competition? I have an uncomfortable thought that both these movies were convenient vehicles for their star leads.

Juliette Binoche was great as always in this mostly interesting, but occasionally slow and pompous, movie about a woman dealing with conflicting claims on her time, her attention, and her life.

Rebecca (Binoche) is a photojournalist who covers some of the world's most dangerous and unstable regions. She is passionate about her work and believes it makes a difference. When she is almost killed while covering an event in Afghanistan, her normally supportive husband objects to the toll her work is taking on himself and their children. She agrees to leave dangerous assignments behind, but is torn between her family obligations and her intense drive to continue her work. This leads to an eventual crisis in her family.

The film catches our interest right away, with a fascinating scene in which Rebecca is shown photographing strange events in Afghanistan. It turns out to be solemn preparations for a suicide bombing by a young woman. Rebecca remains aloof, photographing the events and giving no indication of her feelings. When the bombing takes place prematurely, she is badly injured in the explosion. We get a glimpse of how obsessive Rebecca is when she drags herself from the ground to get a few more shots of the aftermath, before collapsing.

The movie doesn't take sides. A woman asked to give up a successful career for the sake of her husband and children sounds, at first, unfair and patriarchal. We see how brilliant Rebecca's work has been, and how it has sometimes changed things in forgotten areas of the world. However, we gradually see the effect her many close calls have had on her two daughters, who are constantly afraid she will be killed while away on an assignment, and Rebecca acknowledges that she has an obligation to them as well. But nothing is completely one sided: even her older daughter, who was intensely angry about her mother's risk taking, comes to respect Rebecca's work and mention it with pride during a school project.

The family scenes, although lovely and affectionate, tend to drag a bit. Maybe we're seeing it through Rebecca's eyes: she clearly loves her husband and children, but her strongest feelings are directed toward her work.

Eventually, Rebecca comes to the painful conclusion that she has to continue with her work, even at the expense of her marriage. Yet even that decision is not without ambivalence; on a new assignment, Rebecca finds herself facing an ethical quandary, when she questions whether has an obligation to try and stop an evil act, rather than just observe and document the incident. The film ends before she finds an answer.

I just saw this film at the cinema and whilst I thought it was decent (nothing more), my partner absolutely loved it. Her reasons were mainly centered on the emotional aspects of the film, the horrors perpetrated in the world, the appalling abuse of human rights and the dreadful extremism of people's hate. And so, for my partner at least, the film succeeds according to the subject matter, and treatment of it. For me, a film has to have a lot more about it to truly be a great film.

Emotional, hard-hitting subject matter is one thing but quality goes a lot deeper than that. The performances of the actors are an obvious key issue. I thought Juliette Binoche was very good, but not as superb as she seems to be considered. Her character's eldest daughter was very very good, but the youngest daughter was poor. I make every allowance for the age of the actress but she was forced to trot out horrendously corny lines and little childish jokes which never rang true. And the husband? He came into his own towards the end of the film but for the first half he seemed to do nothing more than hang around in the background in brooding silence. I felt like screaming "say something!" at him numerous times.

There are also a lot of painfully contrived circumstances and scenes. The cute little kitten? The fact that the family just happen to live in a quiet, seaside part of Ireland, the total opposite of hot, dusty, busy, landlocked Afghanistan? How convenient a way to highlight the contrast between the lead's home and working life. My point is a great film should not have to rely on such things to highlight its issues.

I have sounded very negative about this film but I'm trying to explain why the film falls short of great. It is a really enjoyable film to watch, definitely worth a go, but I would say don't believe some of the slightly-hysterical reviews.

Beautiful acting, intense story and a roller-coaster of emotions. That kind of sums up what I felt about this movie after seeing it. Juliette Binoche portraits a passionate woman who is torn by the love for her work and the love for her family. Being a war-photographer, her safety is constantly at risk and her passion to show what is happening puts her in even more danger. Her husband cannot accept her neglect of the responsibility she has as a wife and a mother of two daughters. She chooses her family over her work and tries to deal with her choice. But it does tear her apart.

Her husband obviously sees this as well, and suggest to her to take her adolescent daughter to a 'safe' part of Africa to shoot some pictures of a refugee camp and to bond with her. It also gives her daughter some first-hand experience for her school-project about Africa. But her passion takes over when the camp is overrun by a trigger-happy tribe and she smells the sweet scent of danger she loves so much.

Juliette Binoche has created a beautiful multi-layered character. You may not agree with her choices but you do understand them. Nikolaj Coaster-Waldau does a great job as the frustrated husband who loves his wife so much, but can't live with the knowledge that one day she might not be coming home from work. The script is smartly written. The directions keep you on the edge of your seat because it never gets boring and you constantly feel there's something underneath needing to come to the surface at some time. Add some beautiful camera-work and this might as well be one of the best movies I've seen this year. It left me with a punch in my stomach and a lump in my throat. 10/10

This film deals with numerous mature themes, and handles them in an incredibly well-crafted way:

> how families and children in the US are so sheltered and distanced from life around the world;

> how our American dream is the target of extremists who want to blow it up;

> how families can be torn apart by jobs and responsibilities that take them in different directions;

> how committed the people who commit acts of violence are - we really don't have our minds wrapped around their mindsets;

> how spouses support one another's work responsibilities, or not.

Maybe if there's a flaw it has to do with the many theme plots it contains, but in the end I would see it again. And if you will return to see a film twice, then it had to have something of value.

It you want to be entertained, this is not your film of choice. If you want to be engaged in thought-provoking subject matter, go.