“Winter’s Tale” is not a true story nor a love story, but rather, the comedy of the year.
Based on Mark Helprin’s 1983 novel, “Winter’s Tale” focuses on Colin Farrell’s Peter Lake. We meet Peter when he’s just a baby in 1895. His parents so desperately want to come to the United States, but because they’ve got heart conditions, they’re not allowed in. However, it doesn’t have to be that way for baby Peter. Instead of re-boarding their boat and heading back home together, they plop the infant into a tiny model boat, lower him down from their own and then watch as he presumably sails off to New York City.
That covers just about ten minutes of the movie, but right there you’ve already got two devastating problems. First off, this movie is one of magical realism. You’re not going to get a theater full of people to buy into that unless you establish it right from the start. This odd display of two parents risking their child’s life in an absurd effort to give him a better one does not do that in the least, making it even more difficult to adjust and accept when magic is thrown into the equation a little later on. And that brings us to detrimental issue #2, believability. There are countless scenes in this movie when characters are doing or saying something oh-so seriously that makes little to no sense and that turns out to be a highly successful formula for creating laugh-out-loud-worthy moments.
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