A Doll's House | Claire Bloom, Anthony Hopkins

A Doll's House | Claire Bloom, Anthony Hopkins | Worth Showing

DVDs:

A Doll's House

	A Doll's House Claire Bloom, Anthony Hopkins MGM (Video & DVD), 2003 average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A woman's struggle to have her voice heard in a man's world is "startlingly moving" (The Wall Street Journal) in this cinematic adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's famous play. "Superior performances" (The New York Times) by Claire Bloom (Crimes and Misdemeanors) and Oscar®winner* Anthony Hopkins (Hannibal) set the stage for an engrossing and remarkable drama.Nora (Bloom) will do anything to please her authoritarian husband Torvald (Hopkins). Per Torvald's instructions, Nora focuses on such womanly disciplines as dancing and taking care of babies whilehe sees to all the affairs of money. But when a past financial mistake comes back to haunt Nora, and Torvald finds out, the result is an explosion of fury and a shocking revelation that changes the course of the entire family forever. *1991: Actor, The Silence of the Lambs

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A Doll's House, Seriously

This 1970s production of Ibsen's classic play is well worth the viewing -- it's a solid and believable -- if unsensational -- reading of one of the most famous plays in literature -- and one of the key documents in feminism. The total lack of gimmickry and straight interpretation work in its favor -- A Doll's House is one of the canonical works that doesn't need to be updated. Claire Bloom & Anthony Hopkins (the latter shockingly young) support this production with subtle, nuanced, powerful performances. Denholm Elliott is especially good as Krogstad and Ralph Richardson is moving as the dying Dr Rank ("Thanks for the light!") This version of A Doll's House makes a strong argument for tragic plot patterns which have been banished by Hollywood. My Islamic female students responded positively to this play in DVD. I only wish there were more works available in DVD of this calibre.

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Worth Showing

Anthony Hopkins is wonderful as Torvald capturing both the insecure man and the dominating husband. The film is very close to the text. The director staged more aggression from Torvald in the final scene, but my students all agreed that even that, was true to his character and the integrity of the story.

Bloom to Hopkins to Richardson

Ibsen's "A Doll's House with the superb acting of Claire Bloom, Anthony Hopkins and Ralph Richardson. Hubby(Hopkins) dominating and authoritarian in his manner commands his wife lead a perfect and errorless existence. One minor transgression on her part and Hubby goes ballistic. Knowing that her live in almost servant status in the household will end with nothing changing, nothing getting better, she bolts the abode to find her identity and Daddy mind the Baby, much to his consternation. Alls well but the Wife's gone ?

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Excellent satire played straight

Director Patrick Garland's interpretation of Ibsen's famous social satire 'A Doll's House,' while competent and loyal to the source material, lacks effect, I think, mainly for its needlessly dry, Victorian take on a vital, perpetually contemporary theme: the systematic marginalization of those who resist the roles assigned to them by the prevailing mores and conventions of society. Missing in this production is the spirit of Ibsen's wit, which I believe would help us chuckle sympathetically, rather than scowl from a distance, at the vain hopes, hypocrisies and excesses of the playwright's bourgeois set staged in the first two acts, thus providing a much broader context, dramatically speaking, for fleshing out the universal relevancy of the poignant but potentially period-bound subject matter revealed in the third. Ironically, the film's earnest attempts to portray the play's events and characters so literally, so BBCeriously, ultimately work against it and by the final scene the whole exercise seems to have been reduced to a rather dull and dour polemic proposing feminism as an imperfect, last-ditch remedy for 19th century social injustice. Hopkins turns in a skillful but too-restrained performance as the phallocentrically rigid and self-admiring banker/husband Torvald, and Bloom (probably herself over-mature for the role) comes across as too wise and conniving to be believed as the flighty doll-wife Nora. All that having been said, though, the movie is well done. The sets are rich and befitting the era; the actors, however possibly miscast the principals (I'd like to have seen Albert Finney and Susannah York take a crack at the time), are all technically first-rate; and the story, even told as it is, without a hint of caricature, is engaging and paced efficiently by the director.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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