Product Details

• Actors: Christian Bale, Lee Ross, Emily Watson, Elsa Zylberstein, John Wood
• Directors: Philip Saville
• Writers: Adrian Hodges, Julian Barnes
• Producers: Adrian Hodges, Andrew Bendel, Antoine de Clermont-Tonnerre, Enrique Posner, François-Xavier Decraene
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, NTSC
• Language: English, French
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Universal Studios
• VHS Release Date: October 19, 1999
• Run Time: 101 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 0783233299
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #310,333 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Metroland, based on Julian Barnes's first novel, is a tale of midlife, middle-class malaise reminiscent of Ang Lee's The Ice Storm. It's 1977, and shaggy-haired thirtysomething Chris (Christian Bale) has a lovely wife (Emily Watson) and baby, a solid office job, and a nice house in the London suburb of Metroland. Life is good, until the surprise arrival of old chum Toni (Lee Ross), whom Chris has not seen for 10 years and who was his accomplice in teenage shenanigans and heady visions of a bohemian life abroad. Toni, an inveterate ladies man and rootless poet, disdains his old friend's bourgeois milieu and feels it his duty to revive Chris's passion for women, art, and rock & roll. Meanwhile, Chris can't stop fantasizing about his steamier days as a 20-year-old in Paris with his sultry French girlfriend, and fails to notice that Toni covets his wife and that she has sexual desires of her own. While there's a palpable sexual energy in the movie's proceedings that adds a certain zing to the themes of angst and longing, their eventual epiphanies are disappointingly benign. Lee Ross's swashbuckling Toni and Emily Watson's intelligent, knowing wife carry the movie. --Rebecca Wright

From The New Yorker

In this adaptation of Julian Barnes's novel, Christian Bale and Emily Watson deliver sensible, low-key performances as a children-of-the-sixties couple who experience the compromise of a seventies, middle-class English existence. The director, Philip Saville, imbues the early scenes with a strong, questioning tone, and much of the dialogue has the ring of genuine emotion, but there's little drama to the everyday temptations presented. The film bogs down with preachy sentiment, and its ending is far too sedate to leave the audience with much to think about. -Bruce Diones
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fairly interesting look at the married life., February 1, 2002

By 

Brett Johnson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Metroland (DVD)

Some people assume that they will stay young and single forever. Sleeping around, partying, no familial responsibility...sounds pretty good right? "Metroland" takes a look at the life of Chris (Christian Bale). Chris is a married thirty-something living in a nice part of town and has a stable job. All seems content in his life. Then one day out of the blue, his old buddy Toni shows up. Toni tries to bring Chris back into his world of the single life filled with hot women, smoking pot and hanging out at parties. This causes Chris to take inventory of his current life and the decisions he has made. Some of this film is in flashback. It shows Chris as a 21 year old photographer in Paris, where he meets the carefree Annick (played wonderfully by Elsa Zylberstein). He eventually meets Marion (Emily Watson), who is another Brit like himself currently in France. She develops a very low-key bond with Chris and eventually they marry. Was it the right choice?

"Metroland" has a superb cast which plays their roles in just the right manner. Where this movie falters, however, is the mediocrity of the script. An introspective movie such as this should have much more powerful and memorable dialogue than it has. Hardly anything ever really comes out and grabs you. It just kinda rolls along and eventually reaches its conclusion. It could've been a great look at the choices we make and where it ends up placing us in life. As it is, however, it falls short of greatness...but it's still worth a look.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Responsible Dream, May 12, 2001

By 

absent_minded_prof (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Metroland [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Christian Bale stars in "Metroland" as Chris, the early-middle-aged British suburbanite who is suddenly forced to dredge up all his bohemian, idealistic questionings from his early twenties when his old poet-buddy Tony (played by Phillip Saville) shows up. Emily Watson must have sparked many a crush among male cinema-goers, as Chris' mildly stodgy, yet keenly intelligent and feisty wife. Maybe it's just because I'm at a time in life (33) when someone like her is highly attractive, but, well, I thought she was a total babe. But beyond my reaction to her personally, the movie in general has the feel of a real slice of life. This is a set of occurences that many people can relate to, things that strike a real chord.

A few reviewers have commented that this movie lacked a real climax. What did you expect, car chases? Huge explosions? Some kind of cosmic epiphany, perhaps? I think the essence of the charm of this movie can be summed up by Chris' wife's simple obsevation that Tony, the rootless wanderer, is jealous of Chris. Romance and wild times are fine for a couple years when you're young. "Young" in this sense being a socially constructed state, after all -- many people in the world expect to be married and having children, or are busily preparing for it, in their very early twenties, instead of being out drinking and cavorting with Parisian babes. Still, if you are bourgeois enough not to have felt internal forces driving you to get married immediately after high school, as people in many neighborhoods do, after all -- then this movie will speak to you. The point of this movie is that sooner or later, at SOME point, be it at 18 or 30, everyone grows up, and maybe that fact is something other than the zenith of heinousness. I like this movie.

By the way, for anyone out there who likes the basic story of this film, my favorite Julian Barnes book (he wrote the book this movie came from) is "The Porcupine." It's a much more political, different kind of story, but it's really provocative. It makes good use of Barnes' characteristic ear for dialog, and his deft characterizations. If you like Julian Barnes, you should find a copy of "The Porcupine."

"Metroland," at any rate, is positively worth scoping out. Two thumbs up.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The grass is greener, May 8, 2002

By 

infatuationjunkie "infatuationjunkie" (San Jose, Ca) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Metroland (DVD)

This is the first movie that I've seen that depicts a good marriage in a realistic way. Married people are not immune to wanting to have sex with other people, they just weigh those wants against the value of their marriage. This film takes a look at one man's quarter-life crisis spurred on by the arrival of his devil-may-care childhood buddy. It is an exhamination of what one has versus what he invisioned he would have, and a realization of whether or not he is happy. This film is a glimpse at life, not sappy or overly-dramatic, just good.