So much average

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Jeremy Irons plays Tom Crick, a history teacher that is having trouble getting through to his class. His wife Mary(Sinead Cusack), herself in a battle with depression, feels a disconnect with her husband. Mr. Crick grapples with memories of his childhood days that interferes with his present day activities. In desperation to connect with his students, Crick has himself believing he can grab their interest in history by telling them stories from his young adult life. Most of his stories are of a sexual nature and his tales have nothing to do with history. Crick continues with his erotic revelations and even treats his class to a surreal field trip through his most haunting of memories. When forced into retirement, Tom finds that one of his most stubborn students(Ethan Hawke)finally understands there was a certain call for his flirt on the edge of madness.Young Tom is played by Grant Warnock and young Mary is aptly played by a charming Lena Headey. Very strong sexual situations, nudity and an abortion scene calls for an R rating. My favorite sequence is a version of show me yours, I'll show you mine. I found this drama very sad, but yet very interesting. The switching between past and present is not too distracting and an important method of sustaining the story line. The supporting cast features: David Morrissey, Callum Dixon, John Heard and Pete Postlethwaite. Watch for a brief glimpse of a young Maggie Gyllenhaal. If you happen to be suffering any degree of depression, this may not be the film for you; but I really enjoyed it.

Tom Crick (Jeremy Irons)'s wife Mary is obsessed with having a baby even thought she's well past her time. He's a history teacher struggling with know-it-all student Matthew Price (Ethan Hawke) and a restless class. He recounts his youth in the Fens in England to his class enticing them with a tale of murder. The younger versions are played by Grant Warnock and Lena Headey.The modern day story is highlighted by the push and pull of Jeremy Irons and Ethan Hawke with Cara Buono as the teacher's pet. Director Stephen Gyllenhaal uses locations as a way of bringing the class into his story. The modern class interacts with the old stories like they are actually inside the stories.The big discovery is Lena Headey. It's her first big film and she crushes it. She and Grant Warnock have good chemistry as young lovers. The movie is generally dreary. It's tone dark. The old story has a sense of foreboding. Mary's madness is foreshadowing something sinister in their past.The pace is slow and takes a little too much pleasure in withholding its secret. It needs to be more interesting especially in the middle. It meanders as Hawke and Irons walks down memory lane. It isn't the most exciting thing to watch them talk about the past. A more straight forward return to the old story is probably better. Once it goes back to Headey and Warnock, the movie moves along fine. Every time it goes back to Hawke and Irons, the movie slows down because the present storyline isn't the compelling part.

I have not read the novel, but a quick glance at a synopsis of the plot suggests what a mess they've made of it on film. The novel sounds like a serious, intellectual drama. The film is an attempt to simplify the concepts involved, and turn them into a rather straightforward drama. In itself, and no further, this might have succeeded. The failure is caused by other things.The transferral of the Cricks from Greenwich to Pittsburgh is a disastrous mistake - the only reason for doing it was clearly the American box office. Again, the distributors tend to assume that Americans are too stupid to take in a drama set in England. They are wrong.The conversations between Irons (Crick) and John Heard, as American school-teachers discussing education in 1974, are embarrassingly wrong somehow, and bang an entirely wrong beat. The time you first realise Irons is addressing his class of teenagers (Ethan Hawke is 22, actually) as 'children' is even more excruciating. The fact that he apologises for this expression in his farewell speech made me think that one of the script editors had only just noticed how dumb it sounded, and shoved it in as an 'apology' (to the film-goer rather than to the student) at the end.Things get worse. When Irons shows his 'children' a print of the Guillotine and describes, very mildly, some of the mutilated corpses, they all exclaim 'Oh God, no...' and 'Aaargh, how sickening...' They sound more like children from 'Pollyanna', than actual teenagers from Pittsburgh, who'd have grown up under Vietnam, and were just about to see 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.' Nearly every 'American' scene is mind-numbingly awful. Irons's farewell speech is hardly Michael Redgrave (or even Albert Finney) in 'The Browning Version.' Someone had another pointless idea. "When Irons starts talking about his past life, let's have the American teenagers actually transported there on the screen." This makes no sense, and after a while the whole idea seems to have been mercifully abandoned. The scene of them trundling across Norfolk in a truck was risible, and I half-expected Captain Mainwaring and Jones's van to appear at any minute. The assumption behind this 'idea' seems that the film-goer is in reality just as thick as John Heard assumes students are - i.e. no one's interested in history and the past - so our best bet is to actually SHOW Ethan Hawke tramping about in the Fens of WW2.John Heard and Peter Postlethwaite are completely wasted, and David Morrissey does the valiant best he can as Irons's mentally handicapped elder brother. I have always found Jeremy Irons greatly over-rated, and 'Waterland' shows just how insipid his acting can be at times. I was - even within the constrictions of the wreckage made of the Graham Swift novel by the scriptwriters - longing for a Dirk Bogarde or a Christopher Ecclestone. Irons simply doesn't carry it. In fact, the bar room scene with Irons and Ethan Hawke showed how much better Hawke is. I was reminded of Hawke with Robin Williams in 'Dead Poets Society' three years earlier. Even that has tinges of embarrassment (most filmmakers have no real idea what schools or universities are like - watch Lewis Gilbert's hysterical portrayal of a 1980's British university in 'Educating Rita') but 'Dead Poets Society' is great stuff compared to the wet mess of 'Waterland'. (Like most films of this sort, it has lashings of dull 'mood music' - always appearing at the completely wrong moment in the film.)PS Ethan Hawke looks 'pretty.'

I just happened to catch this movie on cable last evening and it captivated me. Waterland should have received accolades when released but I had never even heard of it. All the acting is quite good but I was disappointed only to catch a glimpse of Maggie G. at the beginning of the movie as I was hoping for more of her. The story intrigues as it twists and turns in and out of the past and present without confusion but a slow and steady revealing of itself. Ethan Hawke is intriguing in what may even be his first film. Jeremy Irons fits a history teacher perfectly. I highly recommend this film for everyone who enjoys a good story, excellent acting, and beautiful filming.