I was a bit scared when HBO scheduled this for Memorial Day weekend, the time when television viewing drops off to a minimum, but with the children and grandchildren having gone home, Pam and I sat entranced watching both parts last night on HBO2. She spent her summers on a farm next Baxter State Forest and recognized many of the locales. I simply like Russo, one of our few writers of the human condition in the northeast who avoids New York City.
Yet as I watched the doings of Miles and company wrestling for controls of their souls with the lady in the big house, memory took me back to 9th grade, I think it was, and another lady in a large house, Miss Havisham, and I kept expecting Martita Hunt to come walking into the room. I wish Russo were here so I could ask him politely if Dickens' seminal work influenced him? Maybe this could be a topic for some high school English class essay: rather than Pip being sent for, it is Mrs. Gargery because she broke up the intended marriage. Joanne Woodward seemed a bit too nice for the part, too well fed as it were.
Ed Harris was wonderful as the man who finds one of those puzzles in his closet, the type where you look into the telescope and maneuver the lens to put it together. He is on the receiving end when his father shouts back the accusation that the boy Miles did not tell HIM about Charley and his mother, and later when Charley informs the boy Miles that is was the child who prevented the couple from finding happiness.
The hidden love from the past angle is well done, but despite the excellent work of William Fichtner as the man who stayed in Empire Falls, the idea of Miles as the town failure, the butt of jokes, does not come off. There is too much of an awareness that a saint is walking among them, a saint named Miles, to make Jimmy Minty more than someone dragged in from a George Higgins crime novel.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think the Columbine scene to be a handy device to wrap up loose ends? Finally, when Helen Hunt finds out her intended was born in 1943 and will be 60 soon, or already is, it is very funny though her tipoff should be that few people 50 or younger even remember Petty Como. Yet then we have an epilogue telling us that Empire Falls has become gentrified, and now the natives cannot afford the new houses, but how could all this happen between 2003 and the present?
Yet as I watched the doings of Miles and company wrestling for controls of their souls with the lady in the big house, memory took me back to 9th grade, I think it was, and another lady in a large house, Miss Havisham, and I kept expecting Martita Hunt to come walking into the room. I wish Russo were here so I could ask him politely if Dickens' seminal work influenced him? Maybe this could be a topic for some high school English class essay: rather than Pip being sent for, it is Mrs. Gargery because she broke up the intended marriage. Joanne Woodward seemed a bit too nice for the part, too well fed as it were.
Ed Harris was wonderful as the man who finds one of those puzzles in his closet, the type where you look into the telescope and maneuver the lens to put it together. He is on the receiving end when his father shouts back the accusation that the boy Miles did not tell HIM about Charley and his mother, and later when Charley informs the boy Miles that is was the child who prevented the couple from finding happiness.
The hidden love from the past angle is well done, but despite the excellent work of William Fichtner as the man who stayed in Empire Falls, the idea of Miles as the town failure, the butt of jokes, does not come off. There is too much of an awareness that a saint is walking among them, a saint named Miles, to make Jimmy Minty more than someone dragged in from a George Higgins crime novel.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think the Columbine scene to be a handy device to wrap up loose ends? Finally, when Helen Hunt finds out her intended was born in 1943 and will be 60 soon, or already is, it is very funny though her tipoff should be that few people 50 or younger even remember Petty Como. Yet then we have an epilogue telling us that Empire Falls has become gentrified, and now the natives cannot afford the new houses, but how could all this happen between 2003 and the present?