12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very Good Rendering!, April 1, 2004
By A Customer
The cheesy television drama music score doesn't do wonders, to a mostly wonderful adaptation of Melville's story.
The only other drawback is that the moviemakers didn't have the guts to develop the two supporting co-worker characters, who were perhaps the most memorable part of that story. Melville was tremendous at developing lesser characters the same way Shakespeare paid attention to such details.
But the two main characters, Bartleby and his boss, are marvelously portrayed. They really hit the nail on the head and didn't change their characters from the story at all. Those two characters and the actors who play them make this movie very much worthwhile.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Eerily Successful, June 3, 2006
This shot at one of Melville's best known stories is both a startling short film and on target as to it source. Moved to that banal modern London that Prince Charles is always grumbling about, it turns those plain buildings and awful alleys into the sort of wierd surrealistic beauty that is food for Bartleby's unfathomable spirit. A bold filmic choice, while this locale does not totally explain why he "prefers not to" do much of anything but faceless jobs, and then only half-heartedly, it sets him and gives him gritty and explicable context.
Here an auditor rather than Melville's copyist, Bartleby is taklen in by a small firm's unfailingly decent head marvelously portrayed by Paul Schofield. The battle of wills ensues, a fable of the modern world still appropriate and telling, funny and monumentally frightful. One nows sees that Melville here was a harbinger of Ionesco and Beckett in this relentless experiment in minimalism and ambiguity. This film is a must see for any devotee of America's greatest author, whose facets continue to prove an unexplored goldmine.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Egads Bartleby!, November 29, 2009
There's no doubt that this film has superb acting in it. The cutaway scenes have a purpose to them, the adaptation of the scenes from the short story were a delight to see reinterpreted in a new setting, but this film is quite marred by the fact that herman melville's revelation (about the dead letter office) was put at the beginning, not at the end of the story where it would have given proper closeure and explanation to the plot.
Putting it up front, made it less significant, and it's meaning wasn't dramatised later on. So the film had to play out the rest of the script without fully explaining the significance of the dead letter office bit. I'm all for modernism, and streamlining communication, but the most significant part of the film is really missing.
The character of the Accountant, played by paul scofield, in the short story, actually cries out at bartleby's death "Ah bartleby! Ah humanity!".
In the fillm, he's running off, directing nurses to the dead/unconscious bartleby and doesn't even go back to see how he is. It's like he's finally rid of him. Does it make sense for the accountant to abandon bartleby so quickly after investing himself emotionally to this character for the entire length of the film?
It would have been most satisfying, if we'd just fade out after the death of bartleby, then with a voice over of paul scofield, narrate the last portion:
"Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:--the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:--he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"
This film is good. It's tragedy is that it isn't great.
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