Delayed Reaction: The World to Come

Premise: In the mid-1800s, two women in a remote frontier community fall in love.

 

Look, I'm as big a fan of lesbian period pieces starring attractive actresses as the next guy. Let's throw in a few more Brokeback Mountains too for equity. Even past my base-level enjoyment of this kind of movie though, there are things about The World to Come that I quite liked. It's hard to be mad about this cast. Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby are great always. Like, I'm trying to think of a movie with either of them that they didn't make better. I've got nothing. It's funny seeing Casey Affleck and Christopher Abbott as the husbands, because I feel like Abbott has gotten more than a few roles that casting agents have described as "a younger Casey Affleck". I feel like someone raided a frontier museum for the props. I enjoyed how often Waterston or Affleck would start using a random device I've never seen before for a household task.

 

On a broader level, I appreciated what the movie was trying to go for. You really don't hear many women's stories from that era. The movie captures how stifling it must've been. I'm not sure how common it was for wives to fall in love, but I think there's truth to the excitement Waterston would've felt to simply have a friend in the middle of all that isolation.

 

Personally, I did not care for this movie though. Most of it comes down to the language of the movie. It all sounds like someone reading from a novel. The dialogue spoken is the kind that reads beautifully but sounds awkward when actually spoken. The reliance on Waterston's narration gets in the way of actually adapting the novel to film. I would've liked to see the version of this movie with 10% more dialogue and no narration. Find more cinematic ways to express what Waterston is feeling. Otherwise, why not just read the book? It makes sense that the screenplay was cowritten by the author of the novel. This movie plays like it was written by someone more accustomed to the page than the screen. Perhaps if I liked the language of the dialogue and narration more, I wouldn't've minded as much, but it felt ostentatious to me.

 

The performances mostly keep this watchable. Waterston and Kirby are great on screen together. The sexual tension of those earlier scenes is scorching. Casey Affleck does some good stare-down acting while Waterston is writing in her journal [again]. I wish the movie would've let the performances speak for themselves more often.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend