The Bostonians disappointed me. The subplots of lesbian love, heterosexual love, and suffragette struggles are genuine and nuanced, but tedious, and - at least in this film - pointless. What is highlighted here is the beauty and wealth of a certain segment of society in Boston and New York. The parlor games never reach the clever insight of Jane Austen. The Merchant-Ivory-Jhabawala production is as sumptuous and beautiful and evocative as their other films, but the characters seem distant. Except for Vanessa Redgrave, the acting forced. She, on the other hand, exuded the stress of a repressed lesbian love and her only partially successful attempts to control every aspect of her life a d the lives of selected others.
Review of The Bostonians
