Ahh, imagine my surprise to find a movie with such a winning cast and an intriguing plot summery at 3:30 am.Then, imagine my disappointment in finding a movie that is poorly filmed (lighting was so bad I couldn't tell who the actors were and who was speaking), dialog that was plodding and boring, a story line that was so obtuse as to be untenable.Oh, I was so disappointed. I loved nearly every actor in the movie. It was filmed in Yorkshire, but let's just say it was NOT Agatha Christie's, "Hercule Poirot".OK, I got over that and tried and tried to watch it for what it was but never figured it out and kept falling asleep and having to back the film up to where I dozed off.That is not a good movie folks and believe me I've seen some wonderful movies in my 60 something years of watching.Don't waste your time, unless you want to be transported back to the 60' droll, boring, plodding scripts and filming.

"Books. I like books."Yet she never has any books with her and seems to speak too slowly for someone who would consider lengthening her education. This is just one of the many things wrong with this movie. The "dramatic" lighting was simply clichéd. The plot was far too drawn out and it bludgeoned us with the following themes: books and education, loneliness in love, Nixon/Thatcher, and lack of human understanding. But the problem is that everyone is so stupid and hapless that certain themes (like lack of human understanding) seem to stem from their own stupidity.And how many policemen spend so much time on a case that isn't a crime, brooding away with their mustaches?

I've always loved this movie deeply. I just watched it again for perhaps the sixth or seventh time. I fully agree with the Japanese reviewer that the mention of Nixon is in sympathy, not ridicule. His yearning to be loved by another, is very much meant as a parallel to the young and older Redgrave character - as well as to the young man at the dinner party.David Hare has a wonderful scene here that is very similar to the very end of Plenty - when we see Joely Richardson writing in her diary in 1947 or so (think of Plenty's flashback to Meryl Streep in 1944 or 1945 speaking to the French farmer). The scenes might be full of bathos - but gee, I was overwhelmed both times. This movie has much in common with other Hare ventures - movies like Strapless and Plenty, plays like Skylight and "Amy's View". Hare's deep sympathies are with the romantic, the compassionate, the sensitive, the foolhardy, the collective-minded and the lost. He is antipathetic toward the self-sufficient, the ambitious, the laconic, the individualistic, the successful. I only partly share his sympathy and his antipathy but he makes me appreciate his attitudes through dramas he creates with real living characters. Hare is sentimental in a nostalgic way, and can write wonderfully vivid, intelligent and lost protagonists. I think him a far more intelligent and better dramatist than such left-wingers as Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. Many of us will see much of ourselves in his protagonists' loneliness, our wonder at mistaken hopes from our past, and sense of our own frailties and faults as we grow older.Others speak of similarities to Pinter - I don't see them. Hare is more essentially romantic - even if he doesn't want to be - and I'd place him more with a Jacques Demy than with a Pinter-Mamet and their cold keen patterns of speech and behavior - though granted, he's more concerned with social and political background than Demy.This is essentially a sad movie about one who was once happy - and her wonder and self-realization about another sadder than she. This movie also started me off on two decades of strongly favoring Joely Richardson in any role - as I had always loved Ian Holm and Vanessa Redgrave. (I realized recently that among my several dozen favorite movies since the mid-1960s, about one quarter seem to have Ian Holm in them!). If you like movies like Sunday Bloody Sunday, Butley, Plenty, A Kind of Loving, Quartermaine's Terms - and I do - you'll love Wetherby. I love this movie.

A Pinteresque landscape of a movie. Not quite upper upper class, but upper middleclass, educated, intelligent people, endlessly talking, and trying to "relate". An opening scene that jarred me: Redgrave describing the "sly" look of a student in a literature class. I responded to it as a average thirteen year old nerd would. "Please don't call on me, AND PLEASE DON'T DISCUSS MY LOOKS IN THIS CLASS, OR IN ANY PUBLIC FORUM. YOU'RE KILLING, AND EMBARRASSING ME, TEACHER!" This is a young Judi Dench, and Ian Holm no longer twentysomething, entering middle age. I wonder if they could forsee the international superstardom that would be theirs in a few years? The Richardson and Redgrave clan turns out yet another great contribution to the British stage in the delightful Jolley, Vanessa's daughter in real(not reel) life, playing, you guessed it Vanessa as a young girl. If you had any doubt why I rate London over Hollywood watch this movie. Even if you think it's boring, and, "they talk with funny accents" you can see that these people are artists and are so good the "art" hardly shows. It's not supposed to.