It’s time for a film based on a true story. I’m actually not super familiar with the poem or the guy that the film is centered around. Like I’ve said in the past though, that can actually be a good thing sometimes. It means that the whole adventure will be really fresh and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I wouldn’t say the film ever manages to capture your interest but if you really like the war time environment then you can appreciate the film’s attention to detail.

Okay so the film starts off with a normal family like for Henry and his family. You know the general premise of the film involves tragedy and so the whole time you’re sort of waiting for that to happen. Well, finally it does. His wife ends up burning to death after a tragic accident and then one of Henry’s sons goes off into war and gets badly injured. Henry decides not to write poems anymore as he no longer sees the joy in life. The film is about him learning to experience fun things again and move on.

It can be tough to move on after something bad happens though and for that reason I wouldn’t have blamed him if he never made a poem again. You can never really tell someone when the right time to move on is because that time table will change for everybody. It’s also particularly tough when we’re talking about a close death like what happened to his wife. It’s also just such a tough way to go, there was nothing peaceful about her passing after all.

It’s a reminder to me of why I never liked all the sophistication of old style dresses and garments. The fact that they were so tight that you often needed someone else to help you take them off is crazy. Clothes should be practical in addition to be stylish. Anything that is a potential fire hazard in the sense that you can’t take it off is a bad idea. This was a crazy accident and not the norm but I would say that the point still stands.

As for the son who went off into war, I thought his decision wasn’t bad. He tried communicating with his father first but the guy completely shut down after his wife died. There was no talking to him and the kid wanted to serve his country so he went over to do that. I would never fault that kind of behavior. If he had stormed off without even trying to talk then that would be bad of course but here he exhausted all of his previous options so there really wasn’t a whole lot more that he could do. At least that’s the way I see it.

Henry went through a lot but it is definitely fair to say that he didn’t handle the situation well. He still had 3 kids to take care of and wasn’t there for them emotionally for a very long time. It will come across as harsh but once you have a family to take care of then you can’t afford to shut down like that. It’s just one of the many prices you have to pay when you have kids. You have to continue taking care of them no matter what happens.

Usually I’d try to explain how the film could have been more interesting for me but it’s difficult to think of what it could do. A wild soundtrack would probably feel out of place here even if I would welcome it. There’s not a whole lot you can do about the boring scenery since this takes place back in the olden days. I suppose being less historically accurate would help things but that would hardly be something you could spin to the writers.

The only tangible thing I would mention would be to severely trim down the opening act. We don’t need to see the peaceful life early on, lets just jump right to the tragedy. Have some opening narration about how Henry was married once and now he is married a second time and then the wife dies. From there we jump on the path back to his enjoying life again. You can do this in an easy 80 minute adventure that doesn’t take too long and then we reach the climax. The longer it drags on, the more the film exposes the lack of a big cast and your just not being very interested in what’s going on. It’s easily one of the most boring films I’ve seen in a minute and usually when that happens it’s just a mix of a whole lot of things. The setting is the primary component but it also means nothing else was able to salvage the experience.

At least with the war we got a little action I suppose but even there everybody was being annoying. The kid tries to get into the fights but his commander mentions that he’s being given fake secure jobs at the behest of his father so that he stays safe. The commander can’t be bothered to say this in a nice way either. I forgot what reason they said for why a poet would have such sway but apparently Henry had enough pull to make massive requests like this. The kid still got injured anyway but Henry did his best. Maybe seeing some more of the tension at the army base could work and it did get a reasonable amount of screen time. Just keep it going, it was more interesting than the tales back home.

Overall, The film’s not really my cup of tea but I assume it was probably a pretty close picture of what happened back in the day. When you’re based on a true story, it’s not like you can change the source material or anything like that so I don’t go too hard on the film. At the end of the day it’s meant to be an uplifting story and you’re glad that Henry was able to get it together. Either the story is something that interests you or it isn’t. I’ve never been one for poetry myself. My idea of a poem is that every other sentence has to rhyme and any other structure doesn’t feel like a poem to me. I also don’t find that poems really move me, so in effect the film was starting off on a rocky basis from the jump. If you are really interested in poetry…well that’s actually not a huge part of the film either so you just need to be really engaged with the characters I suppose.