Product Details

• Actors: Jeremy Irons, Sinéad Cusack, Ethan Hawke, Grant Warnock, Lena Headey
• Directors: Stephen Gyllenhaal
• Writers: Graham Swift, Peter Prince
• Producers: Ira Deutchman, Katy McGuinness, Nik Powell, Patrick Cassavetti, Stephen Woolley
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: New Line Home Video
• VHS Release Date: April 16, 1996
• Run Time: 95 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6303980406
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #328,463 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

Tom Crick (Jeremy Irons), the protagonist and narrator of Stephen Gyllenhaal's film, is a middle-aged history teacher immobilized by his own past-by the dire events of his wartime adolescence in the fen country of East Anglia. The 1983 novel, by Graham Swift, from which the picture has been adapted is a determinedly inward-looking work: unpromising material for a film. And this hero-a hopeless, defeated, rumpled-corduroy man, marking time as he slides inexorably toward decrepitude and merciful oblivion-isn't the sort that movie audiences tend to clasp to their bosoms. Yet the picture is, in its gray way, abrosbing and often moving. The screenwriter, Peter Prince, has streamlined the novel's twisty narrative very intelligently. (He retains the book's juiciest, most lurid episodes.) Gyllenhaal's direction is occasionally too studied, but it has some drive. And the actors are awfully good. Grant Warnock and Lena Headey, the young performers who play Tom and his wife-to-be in flashback sequences, bring a convincing and touching adolescent gravity to their roles. Irons imparts a whiff of something like madness to his character's middle-aged desperation, and thus saves it from seeming just another incarnation of the dull, low-horizon resignation familiar to audiences of English films and fiction about educated losers. His performance lifts the movie to the top of the rueful-retrospection class. Also with Sinead Cusack, David Morrissey, Ethan Hawke, and John Heard. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Product Description

A middle-aged high-school history teacher uses his family's traumatic history to illustrate lessons for his students.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A story well told, a novel well adapted..., February 23, 2001

By 

Jens Haetty (Burlington, VT United States) - See all my reviews

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

It is one of those rare moments in life, when you go to a movie theatre, and just purchase a ticket for the next-best movie, not knowing (or caring) what it is about. In one particular case, this was "Waterland", and the money felt well-spent. The original novel the film is based on is set in England. Incomprehensible as it may seem to some to change the setting to a place in the USA for those parts that describe the adult life of that frustrated and unhappy history teacher, it gives the story added depth. The angle from which the movie develops the plot (a teacher, exiled in the US if you will, is challenged from all sides to defend the value of history) is compelling since it unravels most beautifully and emotionally the teacher's own involvement with it. I do not want to give away what the story twists are, go into the film as I did. But the way the movie uses two different time lines to tell the whole story, and interweaves them artfully, is brillant. Jeremy Irons (I actually did not know him at the time, believe it or not) is most fitting as the main character. Ethan Hawke, well I guess they had to pick somebode to play a rebellious pupil, is not bad, but his performance does not contol the movie. Sinead Cusack, on the other hand, plays so convincingly the part of the teacher's wife, still hunted by the common past, that this role is sort of stuck to her in my view.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a beautiful underrated film, December 20, 2000

By 

"prettyclouds26" (el paso, texas United States) - See all my reviews

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

i wonder why this movie hasn't had the appreciation i think it deserves. it is beautifully shot and has a devastating story of guilt, love, redemption and a couple other underlying themes that i'm sure i forgot. oh my god, and i'm telling you the ending will send your eyes to niagra falls. totally satisfies my depressed movie jones. love this!

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Quiet Perfection From Jeremy Irons, December 5, 2005

By 

Natasha Conn (Las Cruces, NM USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

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

I found this movie on IFC late last night and remembered the lasting effects it had on me when it first came out. Irons plays a Pittsburgh history teacher who escapes his crumbling marriage by weaving tales of his family history into his school lessons, he and the students literally walking into WWI veteran hospitals and his childhood home of the English Fens. Irons brings a fragile power to the professor knowing his day his done, his final speech to the school, accompanied by the somber score, incredibly moving. His real life wife Sinead Cusack plays his spouse, ravaged by some dark secret. Though she overdoes the wailing a bit, only Dick Cheney could be unmoved by the closing scenes. See it if only for Irons' gulping smoke rings scene in the bar with Ethan Hawke - the great tortured actor of our era, in one of his best.