Wow! Such a good movie.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Spoiler Alert! This is a film that improves with subsequent viewings. It represents only a small, limited portion of Eliot's personal and artistic life, as other posters have said, but the performances make the movie worth it. All of the performances are well done, but Miranda Richardson is extraordinary as a woman who sometimes struggles to keep herself under control and often loses.The film seems muddled in its presentation of Viv, however. The script has all of the usual mentally-ill-person-as-victim-of-society rhetoric--she's brilliant, a creative free spirit, etc.--and it puts in Mrs. Haigh-Wood's mouth a long speech to Eliot implying her disappointment that he isn't taking care of Viv despite her faults. At the end, the audience is indeed dismayed by her treatment. (And would it have killed Maurice to pick up a pen and write during those long years of her confinement?) But Richardson has been so convincing in her portrayal of an unpredictable force that cannot be controlled, even by herself, that there's a genuine sense of menace. Viv does threaten violence to others as well as to herself, after all, and her breezy dismissal of it as "well, we're alive--no harm done" doesn't help. Although the scene of her being remanded to the institution is sad, there's also a palpable sigh of relief.In short, lots of convincing, no-easy-answers suffering all round.

A reasonably well done and fairly well acted biopic of T. S. Eliot, the film is at times delightful to watch, but it is always lacking. The information it presents about Eliot feels insufficient, as his background feels uncomfortably unknown, and there is also no real indication of the setting and time of the film. It is a bit long too, not always be interesting, and really a bit ordinary at times. But it is still well acted and it does have something to say about the position of women in society. Harris and Richardson were both nominated for Oscars for their performance, but Dafoe is the one who really shines here.

The film starts with a passionate embrace between Tom and Viv on the innocent setting of an Oxford punt. For the next quarter of an hour you may think that this will be an ordinary, merchant ivory type film about an upper-crust gal and her american beau writing away their cares in the dreaming spires of Oxford. However the idyllic setting and the gentle breezes soon fade into nothingness and before long you are forced to comprehend the tortured soul of one suffering from mental hysteria and the immediate effects of that on those who are subjected to the outbursts. Miranda Richardson's performance as the highly strung wife of one of our most famous poets, takes this film to another level. Although the story is essentially a simple love story why it sits apart from the rest is purely down to the fact that Tom suffers Viv's neuroses silently like the true English gentleman he has become. Devotees of T.S. Elliot may find that the film is superficial in its reference to his work and that the focus is centered on Viv. Yet at the end of the film I was left with a heightened awareness of what and who might have propelled him to write the way he did. This bitter-sweet film tugs at the heart strings just so.

This artless art film perpetuates the romantic notion that as long as a clearly mentally ill person shows a tad of artistic inspiration every now and then, she should be given free reign to satisfy her every impulse, no matter how dangerous or self-destructive she may be. I'm getting a tad sick of the Manic as Martyr genre, but as cinema insists on looking back into history for more biopics, I shudder to think of what a future blockbuster like the Zelda Fitzgerald Story could do for the minds of talentless hangers-on everywhere.