Pros: Robin Williams as awkward and earnest young man; Glenn Close as no-nonsense nurse
Cons: Weak,dull, disjointed, and disappointing
The Bottom Line: Based on a great novel, perhaps the film cannot help but disappoint, but valiant attempts by Robin Williams and Glenn close are excellent.
In bed for weeks with an Achilles Tendon rupture, I truly loved the book "The World According to Garp", centered as it was on the life of a nurse, her illegitimate son, injuries, accidents and deaths all happening regularly but arbitrarily. The book just rips along with amusing characters and situations, and you truly want to know what will happen to them next. Most of it is tragedy, existentially told.
Alas, the film falls short of this praise. I wondered seriously if viewers with no book-acquaintance could even follow the plot. One would wonder, for example, who is "Pooh", a four-eyed brat watching our main character rollick in the bushes, who later in life came with a gun to kill him. That she is the sister of the nymphomaniac girl in the bushes might easily escape the viewer. So one could well wonder, who is she and why does she hate Garp so much? Just a weirdo?
Meanwhile, the main female lead is Glenn Close, an unmarried mother and fulltime, live-in nurse at a boys' boarding school in the 1960's. It is filmed in upstate New York at Mill Creek School, a typical old-fashioned, red-brick school with a large green and abundant sports fields. Garp is her son, first played by a boy, later by a young Robin Williams. She is given a free education as a benefit, so her son attends the school and is forced to choose a sport: he picks wrestling. There he falls in love with the bookish and awkward wrestling coach's daughter, whom he ultimately marries.
No plot description can even begin to do justice to the crazy brilliance of the author John Irving's descriptions of life in this school for the short, awkward, unwanted son of the school nurse. They simply do not come through in the film at all, how painfully lowly his status there was.
When he graduates and has no desire for college or career, he announces he wants to be a writer, to escape to New York City. In the book, this is much more interesting: the mother insists that they go instead to Europe, and they spend a year and a half together in Vienna, where Garp can learn about sex from the street ladies. It's quite downplayed in this film, with the New York scenes almost dull. The mother's book, written in Vienna, becomes a bestseller, and they are well-off enough for life.
Perhaps one should see this film in conjunction with the book, either before or after, and then understand why so many ideas cannot be brought to film at all.
Bravo for valiant attempts, and very convincing performances, by Robin Williams as an awkward young man; Glenn Close as a strong-minded and clear-headed, rock-solid and no-nonsense nurse.
Garp's wife is supposedly a professor, but is played by a too-young-looking, too-dowdy woman.
All in all, I was disappointed, but then, I was biased. Someone who's not read the book, try giving us a film review first!
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