Too much of everything

Excellent but underrated film

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I read the book (quite a large one I must say) some months ago and so it was still fresh in my memory when I saw this film. Well, this is one of the worse book adaptations I ever seen! From where to start? From the fact that the 3/4 of the book are literally gone? From the flat performances of all the actors with the likely exception of Andie MacDowel? The miscasting of Ria and Rosemary? The change of Ria in America that it looks like it happened in a split second? Not explaining why the house was that important? I understand it is a big book and they should to summarized it, but it was supposed not to lose it's meaning on the way. Well, it certainly did. Ria is a strong woman at the book even before her marriage fell apart. In the film she is portrayed like a weakling, ready to collapse from the first set. She has a smile like a retard on her face and she's like wearing a sign "kick me".Rosemary is supposed to be drop dead gorgeous woman in the book, while in the film she is more like an overdecorated spinster. Danny is supposed to be a man that looks considerably younger than his age, still having boyish looks in his forties. However, the actor looks like he is a 50 year old pretending he is 40 with that ridiculously long hair....Lastly, the meaning of the house of the title, is that Danny was the one that chose it and hanged on to it in the first place and Ria only learned to love it because of Danny's affection to it. That makes his betrayal even bigger, since he made her love the house and he finally was trying to get her out of it.The only reasons I did not grade this film with a 4 or a 3, was the cameo appearance of Ms. Binchy (the book's author) at a scene (at the restaurant's bar, the lady dressed in blue) and the somehow more condensed ending, even if seemed quite rushed.If you really want to feel the magic of Maeve Binchy's book in a film, I would definitely recommend "The Circle of Friends (1995)".

I do like Maeve Binchy as a writer and liked Circle of Friends so I thought Tara Road might be along those lines but alas it wasn't.The acting seemed very forced and the characters were just not real at all. I just didn't get the feeling that anyone really believed in the character they were playing. I usually like Andie MacDowel and Stephen Rea but their characters just didn't fit.And the American scenes were supposed to be set in New England but were filmed in South Africa. Did the producers and director really think we Americans would think that was New England. Come on! It was ludicrous to expect that leap of faith from us. I would not really recommend this film at all.

TARA ROAD is a thickly populated movie that reaches for the female audience and succeeds in addressing old problems of infidelity and marriage conflicts. The problem is the story by highly published Irish author Maeve Binchy (adapted from Binchy's novel for the screen by Cynthia Cidre) is 'used goods' and while there are many moments of touching dialog there are equal moments of sham resolutions that in the end prove disappointing despite the cast of actors portraying these only occasionally interesting characters.Two women, each bruised by life events, trade homes (Dublin, Ireland and Connecticut) to find the space to recover. In Connecticut, Marilyn (Andie MacDowell) is recovering from the accidental motorcycle (a birthday gift from his father Greg - August Zirner) death of her young son: grief has made her withdraw and lose her feelings for Greg. In Dublin, Ireland Ria (Olivia Williams) is blissfully happy in her beautiful home on Tara Road which she shares with her two children and her newly discovered unfaithful husband Danny (Iain Glen) - a lothario who has had affairs with Ria's best friend Rosemary (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and now confesses to the pregnancy of his current mistress Bernadette (Heike Makatsch). In too quick an instance Ria and Marilyn decide to swap homes with the hope that separation form their families will give them room to readjust to life. Each woman encounters the friends and neighbors of the other: Marilyn meets restaurateur Colm (Stephen Rea) among Ria's odd assortment of acquaintances while Ria encounters the brother of Greg and some intrusive and over the top friends of Marilyn. Gradually it all comes to a very predictable conclusion that simply solves too many problems too easily.Director Gillies MacKinnon seems to have difficulty deciding how to maintain a tone for the film - a tearjerker versus a situation comedy. There are moments when the audience connects with some of the characters, but these are too few and separated by far too many stretches of weak writing. Despite some fine acting the movie never quite flies. Grady Harp

One of Maeve Binchey's most popular novels, complete with a useful American angle, this was an obvious choice for the big screen. However, the story of two women (one Irish, one American) who house-swap makes for a difficult transition in practice. Quite a long novel, it also compresses awkwardly, losing much of its charm and intelligence along the way. The film is not helped by lack-lustre central performances. MacDowell seems out of practice, and Williams (almost invariably seen hitherto in starchy British roles) does not make a convincing Irish housewife. Her emoting seems brittle (even shrill) and she seems uncomfortable with emotion generally. Overall the film looks good and is well filmed, but does not hold the attention except perhaps for die-hard Binchey fans, many of whom will be disappointed at the inevitable over-simplification.