OxfordPress.com

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Verdict: An often lovely, often frustrating, old-school melodrama about love and honor.

Details: Starring Fernando Fernan-Gomez and Cayetana Guillen Cuervo. Rated PG for thematic elements and language. 2 hours, 27 minutes. In Spanish with subtitles.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: It's not a good sign when a movie starts to bore you even before the actors appear onscreen. That's the effect of the camera's lugubrious crawl through an elegant drawing room at the start of "The Grandfather," a Spanish movie that tries to blend a pulp-fiction plot with pastoral scenery and old-fashioned nobility.

Fernando Fernan-Gomez plays Count Don Rodrigo, the now penniless patriarch of a noble family who lost his fortune searching for fabled gold in the Americas, and whose only son has died while he was away. The count's only heirs are his estranged daughter-in-law Lucrecia (Cayetana Guillen Cuervo), and his two granddaughters, whom he loves and is visiting in the countryside at an estate that once belonged to the family. (It's now owned by former servants, whose petty treatment of the old man reflects the film's class-conscious, conservative politics.)

After ambling through a half-hour of talky exposition, the movie's story kicks in, becoming a turn-of-the-century variation on Shakespeare's "King Lear." The count is the Lear figure, his granddaughters a bifurcated version of loyal Cordelia, while their aging tutor, Coronado (Rafael Alonso), is the faithful Gloucester figure to the old man. Lucrecia and the townsfolk, who support her every whim because of her financial and political clout, are the upstarts who wish to shove the old man out of the way.

That becomes especially crucial to Lucrecia once she realizes that the count knows her secret: that one of her daughters is illegitimate. The count determines to discover which of the two is his true heir, even at the cost of exposing their mother's infidelity.

Despite the melodrama of the plot, it's laid out with such talkiness that viewers will be either mesmerized or irritated. If you let yourself get on director Jose Luis Garci's languid wavelength, you might enjoy some retrograde pleasures and the coastal Spanish landscape. In case you start to fade out, the movie throws in repetitive, sentimental music by Edward Elgar and Erik Satie to underscore every emotion.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

[an error occurred while processing this directive]