Empire Falls: Movie & DVD Review (2004)

(Originally published 2004)

It collapses.

From director Fred Schepisi, this underwhelming adaptation of Richard Russo's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, filmed in Maine, will leave native Mainers covering their ears.

The accents are wrong, with the film's lauded cast making the same mistakes so many have made before them--they make us sound like village idiots.

The problems extend to Schepisi's direction and to Russo's script, which generate a soap opera of awkward situations, forced relationships, and slow pacing. Caricatures take the place of characters. The film is so stagy, you watch its hive of interweaving stories from the outside, never really believing there's an inside.

The core of this three-hour journey has its heart in the right place--the movie is concerned with the class differences of small towns, the loss of those small towns when they fall on difficult times, and how those complexities come to affect its characters, particularly its main character, Miles Roby (Ed Harris). But unlike the more interesting book, those complexities fail to transcend the screen; elements become mawkish.

Like any soap opera, "Empire" isn't without its moments--Joanne Woodward gives it her best shot as the wealthy yet one-dimensional Francine Whiting, and Robin Wright Penn does some fine work as the cancer-stricken Grace Roby. Others don't fare as well. Paul Newman is silly and predictable as the town drunk, Max; Helen Hunt is miscast as the sketchy Janine Roby; and Harris' Miles never connects.

When I interviewed Harris after filming had wrapped on "Falls," he said that what he enjoyed about the movie is that "it takes its time in telling its story." Turns out he wasn't joking. "Empire Falls" takes too much time--and then it takes an hour more.

Grade: C-