Product Description

From acclaimed writer/director David Hare  (The Hours, Damage) comes Wetherby, the compelling story of Jean Travers (Vanessa Redgrave), a schoolteacher whose life changes completely when a young man breaks into her home, and then kills himself right in front of her for no apparent reason. As Jean’s friends (Judi Dench and Ian Holm) struggle to help her, Jean is drawn deeper and deeper into a web of memories and deceptions. Vanessa Redgrave (Howards End, Camelot, The Bostonians) delivers a superb performance in Wetherby, a taut psychological drama that will keep the viewer guessing until the film’s final moments.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #81111 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2004-11-16
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 102 minutes

Customer Reviews

One of my favorites from the 1980's
I agree with the reviewer SILVOX, this has long been an overlooked film. I saw it when the film was first released in the theatres, I then owned an VHS copy, and I was happy to finally get the DVD release. The movie examines human loneliness through the life and love affairs of the various characters. Venessa Redgrave and her daughter, Joely Richardson, were both spectacular in the movie. The music score and the camera work were outstanding.

Redgrave gives a fantastic performance
Besides qualms with the musical score, Wetherby has a killer script, intriguing editing, fantastic acting (Vanessa Redgrave is incredible), and a compelling idea driving the film. I liked the echoes of film noir in the intense, high-contrast lighting; the starkness of the violence was perfect, especially when combined with naked silence. It is more than a story about a disturbed young man who shoots himself in front of an aging school teacher, Jean Travers (Redgrave). That comes early in the film. It is about the psychological consequences for Jean in her life and past that are violently revealed through that shocking act. Life can never be normal again. Beneath even the most pleasant veneer lurks sadness, secrets, and dark sexuality.

OVERLOOKED AND RIVETING
Vanessa Redgrave is spinster school teacher Jean Travers in David Hare's engrossing, overlooked, WETHERBY (Home Vision). This 1985 drama from the director of "The Hours" concerns the impact on Travers' life when a young man -- an apparent stranger -- breaks into her home, and shoots himself in her presence. Judi Dench and Ian Holm are Travers' good friends who -- much like Biblical Job's comforters -- try and help her cope and understand as she finds herself drawn deeper and deeper in a flood of memories and nightmares of unfulfilled love, longing and deceptions. Redgrave and her daughter Joely Richardson are utterly riveting in this superb and increasingly tense psychological drama that keeps its tantalizing secrets almost until the final fade out.

No extras on sharp looking transfer, but box includes a printed intro by Hare and an unusually insightful essay ("Have You Been True To Me?") by Brian Mcfarlane.