Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hey. It was the '60's!, October 24, 2006
---I first saw this movie at the theater my second year of college (1968-69) in Texas. At that time, it being the late 1960's, it seemed perfectly normal to me that it was complex and confusing. It was psychedelic. How can anyone who enjoyed the Beatles "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," "Magical Mystery Tour," and the "White Album," not to mention The Doors' "Strange Days," or Iron Butterfly's "Inagodadavida" (sp?), complain about a movie that is confusing?
---Nicholas Urfe (Michael Caine) accepts a job as an English teacher at a private boys school on the idyllic Greek island of Phraxos. As he settles into his room, he finds a cryptic note left in a drawer by his predecessor who had committed suicide. The note reads "beware the waiting room." On the weekends Urfe explores the far side of the island and discovers the villa of the mysterious Maurice Conchis (Anthony Quinn) who invites him for weekend visits where Conchis entertains Urfe with his life story. In these stories of his past, Conchis presents to Urfe major dilemmas where the choices are life-changing. Subsequently, in a series of "Twilight Zonesque" time shifts, Urfe finds himself trapped into reliving these same stories and being forced to make the same life-changing choices. The effect is, well, "mind-blowing," both for the character Urfe, and for the viewer. Is Urfe hallucinating or dreaming, or is this a well-planned masque, directed by the "master-manipulator" Conchis, where Urfe is unwillingly cast as the central character?
---I guess my take on it is that the mind-blowing nature of the film fit very well with the zeitgeist of the late 1960's. The film itself may be lacking, but the greater story, only partly told in an abbreviated version in this movie, is much, much better than could ever be captured on film. Instinctively, I knew this and sought out the book in the Fall of 1969. I found it at Doubleday Bookstore in New York City while visiting for the Texas A&M vs. Westpoint football game. The book helped me survive the long, cold, rainy winter of 1969-70, as I was manipulated into making life-changing decisions -- school vs. Vietnam, girls vs. grades, polyester vs. cotton, Santana vs. Led Zeppelin, etc. etc. etc. As Nicholas Urfe rode the roller coaster of his life, so did we.
---I'm glad to see that the movie is in video.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
What Might Have Been, May 28, 2007
One of the reviewers mentioned David Lynch. I recall waiting with anticipation for the film adaptation of _Dune_, hoping that the movie in my mind would be realized, and discovering through the film flaws in the book that my adolescent mind had not noticed when I fell in love with it. Something like that is true of _The Magus_ as well. It *is* fairly faithful to the book, and many of the more embarrassing scenes of dialogue are taken directly from it. So my first reaction to seeing this film is a troubled sense that I was wrong to love this book.
What's missing? Three things: time, the narrator, and a realist texture. For a sense of what I mean by the third, see Minghella's _Talented Mr. Ripley_ to see how this film should look, should feel (indeed, how, if it were remade today, it could even be cast--all that's missing is Ben Kingsley as Conchis). But what makes the book work is that the fascinating and bizarre events are made plausible by their embedding in a realistic frame: Nicholas' life away from Conchis' universe is utterly real by being largely veiled autobiography. He is the typical callow young man as would-be writer, struggling fitfully to overcome his narcissism and join the human race, while desperately clinging to that same narcissism in the knowledge that only this will allow him to become the artist he would betray himself by not becoming. The Conchis Masque is but the externalization of Nicholas' "therapy" as he sorts through this paradox, grows up and becomes a Real Writer. For every Real Writer is perilously close to a merely Failed Human Being.
In the book, Nicholas experiences Bourani (the site of Conchis' manipulations) the way people experience affairs: as what seems for a time an endlessly fascinating distraction from the intolerable experience of being who they are. On this level, the book is essentially the story of an affair, and Nicholas' guilt is an essential part of him finding his way to resolution. But the film so compresses the events that we get only Conchis, only the affair, and almost none of the narcissism, tedium, failure and self-doubt of Nicholas, or the process by which he comes to terms with them through his guilt over how his self-importance and thirst for experience harm the women in his life. And yet it is this which makes the book seem real (especially to the many young Nicholases who read it) and thus confers reality on the otherwise incredible, and incredibly silly things that transpire on the island.
I remain convinced that this film could've been done, but there must be much much more of the ordinariness of Nicholas, so that the fantastic stands out that much more. _French Lieutenant's Woman_ gives us some inkling of how a very free but literate adaptation can be penned, and _Talented Mr. Ripley_ gives us some notion of how it could be shot. But it must be *much* longer, and that length should be devoted to showing what the novel shows: how we grow through love.
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15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Why Novelists Should Never Write Their Own Screenplays, October 17, 2006
This film is intriguing at first, and it's beautiful to look at, but it's a bit of a mess. The problem is simple: John Fowles, the author of the famous novel, decided to write his own screen adaptation. He apparently hated the screen version of his other novel, THE COLLECTOR, three years earlier, and he didn't want Hollywood to botch THE MAGUS. Well, they did botch it--and it's entirely his own fault.
THE MAGUS is a novel of ideas, not action. The flimsy story and symbolic characters (Urfe rhymes with "earth," Conchis is pronounced "conscious" which means "alive," the lily in Anne's lucky paperweight becomes "Lily," the girl on the island, etc.) are only there to serve up a large dose of Fowles's philosophy--basically, that life is a dream and love is the only reality. But it isn't exactly photogenic, and Fowles the screenwriter has taken Fowles the novelist entirely too literally. What we get is a page-by-page adaptation of a talky, elliptical, difficult book. If Michael Caine (Urfe/earth), Anthony Quinn (Conchis/life), and Candice Bergen (Lily/love) look uncomfortable, or even downright confused, who can blame them? They were asked to play symbols, not characters, and to say and do things that couldn't possibly make sense to anyone unfamiliar with the novel. A film is not a novel, and vice versa.
Bottom line: read the wonderful novel, then tackle the film. Or skip the film entirely. The screenwriter doesn't seem to understand the novelist, despite the fact that they're the same person. And that is why we have professional screenwriters. I'm glad Fowles allowed Harold Pinter to do the screenplay for the film of his next novel, THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN. Now, there's a movie that does justice to the source material. But as for THE MAGUS, well....
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