Catharina_Sweden I watched this movie yesterday night. It made me cry! Then I dreamed of it at night, and when I woke up I still had a melancholy feeling in my stomach and a sweet pain in my heart. Very few movies or novels affect me this strongly nowadays!The depiction is bleak but romantic, tender, and very, very fine. The actors are all very good in their parts. This is one of those love stories that make you take the side of the adulterous couple, however much you are against such behaviour in ordinary cases. Mutual love can be so hard to find, and when you find it but cannot have it because of circumstances in the world around, you "never want to leave this hill"...

bkoganbing The crippled body and unfriendly personality of Ethan Frome greets a newly arrived visitor in that small New England town where Frome has a farm. The town minister Tate Donovan tells the reason why.Back in the day Frome played here by Liam Neeson was a typical tightlipped New England farmer trying his best to eke out a living on the played out soil that characterized New England in the day. He has to do the work of two because his wife Joan Allen is a sickly sort. Out of desperation he hires a servant girl to be a live-in maid. The fetching Patricia Arquette brings out some emotions that Neeson hasn't felt in years. But this is a most conservative rural part of New England and besides Neeson has the usual guilt pangs in regard to Allen. In the end it all turns out rather badly for Neeson and Arquette and let's say in the matter physical and mental well being the tables have been drastically turned. Ethan Frome never got a big screen treatment before and I can see why, it's a real downer of a story. It ran as a play in 1936 on Broadway for 120 performances and it starred Raymond Massey, Pauline Frederick, and Ruth Gordon. No screen credit was given the play's authors so I guess it wasn't used in any way for the screen adaption. There was also a TV special which starred Sterling Hayden as Ethan Frome, casting very much in line with using Liam Neeson here.The cinematography depicting New England of the 1890s was superb I don't think Edith Wharton would have any complaints. I don't think it's the best of her novels though, I'm not even sure what the point of her story was. Still Neeson, Arquette, and Allen deliver fine performances and devotees of Edith Wharton should be pleased.

secondtake Ethan Frome (1993)This is a classic Edith Wharton melodrama, a hyper-romantic short novel that has turned on and turned off many high schoolers and literature majors over the years. It's a great story and it's hard to go totally wrong with it, but it's an old fashioned story, and more slow and steady than filled with amazing or surprising turns and emotional insights.Another way to put it is: it isn't a Bronte novel.So a movie version of Ethan Frome has to find some way of pulling us in very deeply, through characterization, through ambiance, through an attention so small things that make the main plot take on resonance. None of that quite happens here. The photography makes clear from the first scenes that it is very careful, which isn't a bad thing. The whole film has a steady, beautiful, somewhat constrained quality, using lots of available light. We watch the title character, played by Liam Neeson, with a growing sense of calm partly because of the camera. When we discover the relationship between Frome and his wife, and then with his wife's relative who has come to "help" them with chores, it is always bordering on stiff. I think this is meant to imply a formality to life at the turn of the century (the book was written in 1911 and set a few years earlier). But to my mind people were not so poised, or afraid, or following puritanical strictures as all that. At any rate, the move ends up weirdly flat as a result. We know the events are romantically intense, but we don't get swept away by them. It's surprising no movie version has been attempted before this one. And it will be surprising if another is tried, hopefully with more effect. This isn't at all bad, nothing glaring here, but being "not bad" isn't quite the idea in the end.

Jordan L. Hyde Although I found the acting excellent, and the cinematography beautiful, I was extremely disappointed with the adaptation.One of the significant portions of the novella is the fact that Ethan and Mattie decide to kill themselves, rather than go on. This is never presented in the movie, they show it as if it were a sledding accident.The character changes in Mattie and Zenna are almost non-existent. While in the novella they almost change places, at the end of this adaptation it appears as if they are both invalids.Lastly that Mattie and Ethan consummate their relationship fully nearly destroys the power and poignancy of the finale.The change of the narrator being a preacher was one effective change.Neeson and Arquette are superb in their portrayals. Joan Allen was also wonderful, however her character was much watered down from Whartons novella.I do not expect films to faithfully portray novels, but this one went to far and in the process nearly destroyed the story.Overall, I would not recommend watching this film unless you have read the book as you will come away confused and disappointed.