Under Heaven (1998)

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Blistering performances.

Director Meg Richman has tried, as others have tried, to convert a Henry James literary work into a compelling movie, but falls far short, as others have before her (see 'Wings of the Dove,' 'The Bostonians,' 'The Ambassadors,' 'Portrait of a Lady,' and 'Daisy Miller').James's novels and novellas, based on the late-Victorian age of social suffocation (most often visited upon women yearning to be free), are ponderous and often very depressing examinations of love, deceit, devotion, recklessness, human folly. The list goes on and on. If it's about the strictures of human emotion, James is your man. His great strength in print is his weakness when transmitted to the screen: he conducts painstaking examinations of humanity's inner self, and is a challenge to read. Those who try to adapt his films (and try to be faithful to them) tend to sink under the weight of his relentless psychological questions. 'In the Shadows,' AKA 'Under Heaven' and 'In the Garden,' is at least a two-hankie drama that is based on 'Wings of the Dove.' It is partially effective, but it ultimately becomes basically yet another one of them thar soap opries, replete with hokey dialogue.If you watch the theatrical trailer for this film, you'd think you were going to watch something entirely different. The trailer suggests a hot-blooded, scandalous examination of secret sex and intrigue. In other words, as so often happens, the distributors must have decided the flick needed more 'juice,' more 'edge' when no such 'juice' or 'edge' existed. We know going in what is going to happen in this movie, and any number of sensation-making trailers will not change things.Molly Parker as Cynthia and Aden Young as Buck give surprisingly good performances as lovers who are transformed by a series of sad events. But I was really surprised by Joely Richardson's performance. She is a classically trained actor, but she seems to be miscast in this movie. She seems indifferent to her part (for good reason it seems to me), and speaks her lines with a flatness that is almost comical. "This love is strong," she intones to Buck (Young), "stronger than cancer." Embarrassing. (Coincidentally, Richardson's real-life mother, Vanessa Redgrave, who has never given a bad cinematic performance, still had to struggle in the 1985 adaptation of James's 'The Bostonians'. It didn't work: the movie was one boring flop.)Richman deserves a lot of credit for trying to rework James, to try and give us a 'serious' film amidst all the popcorn crap. But to me it's a pretty lost cause. It's very hard to pull James out of the insufferable parlours of the 19th century.

I understand most of the comments in here! But this film raises the questions of "how do you define love?", Questions of class inadequacy?" and "What is the true value of wealth and morality?". In this film 3 very different people come together and change each others lives with some very different results. Eleanor (Joely Richarson) despite dying, she achieves happiness by understanding that those around her felt love, jealousy or were deceptive toward her. Cynthia (Molly Parker)despite loosing her love & being deceptive, she was able to understand the true value of family. She also learned that one true value doesn't necessarily come through wealth. And Buck (Aden Young) despite of loosing his true love, was to love for the first time and stop being uncaring. The film the definition of love goes beyond the physical sense of human understanding & shows that people can be love for who they really are. Once this is done, you omit any notion of beauty, ugliness and sex as the attributes of love. The inadequacy between social classes in the film raises the issue that despite some of us being born privilege or underprivilege, everyone basic needs remain the same (sustenance, love, being love, etc). Lastly, the film questions the value of wealth and how much of an importance do we put in our lives to achieve it, since in the end, we cannot take any of it with us. But it is our families and our deeds that are our true treasures and measure of our value as individuals.

I've seen this movie so many times, and it still makes me cry. Spectacular performances, an excellent adaptation, and a good soundtrack. It makes Henry James so much more applicable. It's a little hard to find, but definitely worth the effort.

If anyone has seen Days of Heaven, there's no need to suffer through Under Heaven. The tension and credibility have been drained out of this Wings of the Dove remake. An interesting cast has had all their life and spontaneity removed. Heavy-handed movie-making at its worst because there's talent wasted here.