7.3 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
The life of novelist T.S. Garp, and his mother, Jenny, a nurse. While Garp sees himself as a "serious" writer, Jenny writes a feminist manifesto at an opportune time, and becomes a magnet for all manner of distressed women. Based on the novel by John Irving.
Starring: Robin Williams, Mary Beth Hurt, Glenn Close, John Lithgow, Hume CronynDrama | Insignificant |
Comedy | Insignificant |
Romance | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
John Irving's fourth novel, The World According to Garp, was published in 1978 and remained a bestseller for years. Copies were everywhere, but I sometimes wondered how many people made it to the end. Garp was densely literary, with stories within stories, and although Irving's sense of comedy was unique, it was also dark and often horrifying. Death and injury lurked around every corner. The novel's protagonist devoted much of his time and energy to anticipating disaster so that he could avoid it, but he usually failed. The novel's sense of inexorable doom was symbolized by the dangerous undertow in the ocean near the house owned by T.S. Garp's mother, misheard by one of his children as "the Undertoad" and imagined as a monstrous amphibian that emerged from the deep and dragged swimmers to their death. Like many artists, Irving exorcised his personal demons by externalizing them, and he has a talent for creating a fantasy version of the real world into which he draws readers with a kind of whimsical narrative voice, then sucker-punches them with something terrible (but always with an absurd and often hilarious twist). He is particularly skilled at incorporating contemporary issues—in the case of Garp, the Seventies version of the women's movement—in caricatures that leave his own position uncertain. Garp has been called both pro- and anti-feminist. In fact, it is neither, just as it is neither pro- nor anti-marriage, adultery, celibacy or any of the other phenomena explored in Garp. Irving simply creates characters who live different aspects of these phenomena and lets them act out their nature. The most that can be said of the author's perspective is that, like his protagonist, he expects the worst but keeps trying. The 1982 film adaptation of Garp by director George Roy Hill (The Sting) received mostly respectful reviews, although fans of the novel were predictably disappointed at the many elements that had to be omitted to condense the sprawling narrative into a film. Critics who either didn't like or hadn't finished the book greeted the film with a reaction summed up by the late Roger Ebert: "What the hell was that all about?" Today, with the novel's notoriety having faded, the film has a better chance of standing on its own merits. It must be said, though, that Hill, working from a screenplay by Steve Tesich (Breaking Away), did a remarkable job of recreating Irving's unique tone for the screen. He did it with careful, inventive casting, well-chosen locations and an unobtrusive style that sneaks up on the viewer much like Irving's prose.
The World According to Garp was shot by Czechoslovakian cinematographer Miroslav Ondrícek, who had previously worked with director George Roy Hill on Slaughterhouse Five and was the regular DP for director Milos Forman. The Warner Archive Collection has newly transferred the film at 2k from a recently created interpositive for this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray. The results are impressive. Much of Garp is set in the pastoral environs of the Steering Academy, the peaceful New England seaside or the (mostly) quiet suburban location where Garp and Helen raise their family. Hill and Ondricek use a gentle watercolor palette for all three locales that provides a soothing counterpoint to the story's darker elements. (It's one of the film's substitutions for John Irving's quiet narration.) WAC's Blu-ray reproduces these shadings with care and delicacy. Even the relatively brief sequences in New York use soft hues, as compared to the flash of neon and saturation of color with which the Big Apple is often associated. The image is detailed and film-like, with a natural grain pattern that appears undisturbed by untoward digital manipulation. WAC has mastered Garp at what has become its default average bitrate of 35 Mbps, and the encoding has been done skillfully.
Garp's original mono track is presented in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, with identical left and right channels. It's a robust track with good fidelity and dynamic range, clear dialogue and well-mixed sound effects for such diverse events as a small airplane crashing into a house and a high school wrestling tournament. The gentle strains of the Beatles' "When I'm Sixty-Four" open and close the film, having acquired ironic overtones during the two hours or so in between. No composer of original music is listed, but David Shire (Zodiac) is credited as "music adaptor".
The only extra is a trailer (480i; 1.78:1, enhanced; 2:12), in which you can see the marketing experts working hard to disguise the film as a conventional comedy. Warner's 2001 DVD was similarly featureless.
Timing is everything, says Garp's publisher in explaining the extraordinary sales of Jenny Fields's autobiography. The same applies to The World According to Garp, both the novel and the film. I doubt whether either version of Irving's story could gain much traction in today's world of polarized debate and instant feedback. Long before anyone had spent sufficient time in Irving's alternate universe to absorb its funhouse mirror version of sexual politics and meditate on what it reveals about our world, the issues would have been sliced and diced into sound bites and people would know where they stand without ever reading the book or watching George Roy Hill's adaptation. (You can already hear it: The Ellen Jamesians are a misogynist attack on feminism. Roberta Muldoon is an endorsement of the transsexual "lifestyle". Etc.) Just as Hill's style of moviemaking belongs to an earlier era, so does Garp's dark but contemplative view of the uses of fiction. WAC's Blu-ray is an excellent presentation of this stubbornly individualistic film. Highly recommended for those willing to devote the time and effort.
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