Carrington (1995) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Scoop's comments in white: 

It was certainly a strange decision to name this film Carrington. It's about the seventeen year relationship of painter Dora Carrington and author Lytton Strachey, but ...

1. Lytton Strachey was famous, Dora Carrington was not.

2. Lytton Strachey was witty and learned. Dora Carrington went from high school to an art school, was unlettered, and a woman of no special appeal.

Well, so be it. Strachey gets all the good lines, as he did in life, but Carrington got the title.

Their relationship was unique. Lytton Strachey was a homosexual, who first noticed Dora when he thought her a lovely young boy. Although they could find nothing to talk about, and she was not a boy, Strachey decided to kiss her on their first walk together. Carrington stayed in love with Strachey for the remainder of their lives. (They met in 1915. Strachey died of stomach cancer in January, 1932, and Carrington committed suicide about two months later, while still in her 30's.)

• These people were odd and interesting, so your curiosity will be piqued by their story. Just how did they work all this out in reality?
• The photographic composition is artistic and beautiful.
• The dialogue is witty and literate. Strachey was a member of the famed Bloomsbury Group, the English equivalent of the Algonquin Roundtable, a group of wits and raconteurs who assembled frequently to exchange bon mots, intellectual pleasantries and literary gossip. Keynes, the famous economist, and the author Virginia Woolf were also members.
• It is acted beautifully by Jonathan Pryce and Emma Thompson, who seem to evoke the originals flawlessly. They look exactly like them, as well. When I first saw the picture to the right, I thought it was from the film, but it is the originals!
• It is educational, providing a painless lesson on the customs and interests of the English intelligensia between the wars
• Some of the scenes are excellent. The one I liked best was shot from outside a mansion in which the camera followed the pairing off of many lovers, then pulled back to show Carrington sitting alone outside, just a spectator like the rest of us. There was some brilliant camerawork in that scene as well. 

Is it a great movie? No, not in the sense that it will have broad appeal to a wide range of viewers. It is an excellent and straightforward chronological recitation of their interesting lives, so is therefore interesting in that regard. There is, however, no additional cinematic structure imposed upon the script to give the film a life of its own. It is interesting mainly because they were interesting.

It is a slow-paced film; not much happens; it is subtle, and artistic. Those are not necessarily weaknesses, but they are elements that most of you do not enjoy in a film.  If those elements do not scare you off, go for it, because it is done well. I enjoyed it.

There is, in my opinion, one weakness. Dora Carrington, as shown in the film, possesses no great wit or charm. Nor is she quite beautiful, nor overwhelmingly talented. So this biopic fails to answer the one question that I would consider central to her life story, which is "why did one of the world's most renowned literary figures love her so dearly, in a pseudo-erotic way, despite the fact that she was the wrong sex for him?" Frankly, although that seems to be the one interesting question that a biopic should answer, I still didn't know "why" when the movie ended. 

Tuna's comments in yellow:

Carrington (1995) tells the story of a platonic, but all-consuming love affair between artist Carrington (Emma Thompson), and gay writer Lytton Strachey. Throughout the course of the film, they each have many male lovers, often the same men, but they remain bound together. Both were members of the Bloomsbury Group, a gathering of British geniuses during WW I. The film is entirely fixated on the sexual antics of members of the group.

It was beautifully filmed and acted. Nevertheless, I was disappointed. In knew very little about these people before the film started, and I still know little about them. It is essentially a story of sexual exploits counterbalanced by the platonic love, but certainly doesn't have enough erotic content to carry that theme for two hours. I was completely unable to see what all of the men she paraded through her bedroom saw in her. In point of fact, the eye candy only took me so far, and I couldn't wait for it to end.