Character (1997)
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Character Movie Review
Character is a 1997 Dutch historical thriller film directed by Mike van Diem. It’s a very odd, problematic Oscar winner.
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“People who can’t accept a gift
have nothing to give themselves“
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A young lawyer is the chief suspect in the murder of the cold-hearted bailiff. The two have long been rivals, waging personal battles through the courts, and he was observed leaving the scene of the crime. Giving his testimony to police, the man effectively tells his life story, in which his ambition for success in the legal world was driven by a hatred of his biological father.
Needless to say, the movie is intriguingly plotted, at least in its premise alone, given that the execution is so incredibly weak. I liked quite a bit the beginning and the ending of the movie as they were cool and interesting, but they are still hugely problematic.
I am talking about the movie’s dual nature as it very much acts like a standard sprawling historical movie with some thriller elements. We follow the protagonist through many years, and only the beginning and ending contain thriller elements, but because those are only two scenes, I got the sense that they were just put there to make an impact, and they were interesting, but still they felt out of place.
That uneasy nature to the movie was its undoing. Otherwise, the film is well acted and overall well made across the board when it comes to the technical aspects. But the direction really should have been better and the pacing is horribly slow, and the movie was quite dull and uneventful in its extremely long second act.
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It is an original experiment, but it mostly did not work for me. I don’t know about the quality of the other nominees as I have yet to see them, but this one surely did not deserve to be honored by the Academy. The nineties surely weren’t the strongest when it comes to the foreign category at the Oscars.
Character is an original experiment, but it did not work for me. It is well made across the board and the beginning and ending are cool, but they still felt out of place as the film’s mixing of historical and thriller elements seemed uneasy and unpolished. It’s also overlong and slow-paced.
