Anthony Hopkins King Lear on Amazon: a cast to die for - Emma Thomson, Emily Watson, and Florence Pugh as the daughters. And this is clearly a 'family Lear' rather than a 'kingdom Lear.' All four are pretty damn good, but this was clearly done in three months, the full implications of it are not thought through, and there's a complete disconnect between what Hopkins is doing and what Thomson and Watson are. Hopkins's Lear is so thoroughly vile to Regan and Goneral that you completely understand why they rebel against him, but they suddenly turn into harpies and we're supposed to withdraw our sympathy as quickly after they thoroughly earn it. All three of them play villains so well that it's even more jarring to see them go from villain to victim and back so quickly.
The opening scene is done as a kind of contest of wills between Lear and Cordelia, a great idea, and Florence Pugh is the best thing in the whole movie, not a wilting flower but a rebellious teenager who's had it with her father's bullshit. But the parts of Edmund and Edgar are diminished to a nub and every time they come on stage it becomes a stupid sideshow, and the Fool gets even less airtime.
The best King Lear on TV is still Ian McKellen directed by Trevor Nunn. Every detail is so throughly thought through that it's, for once, a coherent telling of a Shakespeare play. Movies, on the other hand, have both Kurosawa's Ran and, especially, Kozintsev's King Lear in Russian, which along with (and especially) Kozintsev's Hamlet in Russian is one of the very great movies of all time.
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