Where Angels Fear to Tread movie review

April 30, 2010 - #11/100
Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991)

Lilia Herriton (Helena Mirren), a rich widow, and Caroline Abbott (Helena Bonham Carter) are from England, but travel to Italy to get away for a bit. While in Italy, Lilia meets Gino Carella, who is an poor Italian boy around the age of twenty one. They fall in love and get married. Philip Herriton (Rupert Graves) heads to Italy to reprimand Lilia and stop the marriage from happening, only to find out that they are already married. He then heads back to England, and him, his sister Harriet, and his mother basically try their best to forget about her. Months past, and Lilia gives birth to a son. But, she dies while giving childbirth. Therefore, Philip and Harriet head back to Italy in order to attempt to get the child. Caroline also heads to Italy to collect the child, but once she watches how Gino treats the child, she can't bear to take his son away from him. Eventually, Philip feels the same way about the situation. However, Harriet never does. She ends up stealing the child late one night, and things happen. I didn't want to give away too much in case if whoever is reading this might want to see this movie sometime in the future. Personally, there were several aspects of this movie that I found to be confusing. For example, I never really understood Helena's character. So, I'm just assuming that she was a friend of the Herriton family, seeing as how this was never really clarified. Also, Italian was spoken a lot in this movie, and it failed to always have subtitles in English. Therefore, I didn't understand half of what was being said. Also, the background music seemed to be a lot louder than usual. I had a hard time hearing what the actors were saying, but when I turned it up, the music was way too loud and it was overpowering the talking. So, because of this, maybe this is why I'm still confused about several different aspects of the movie. Since I am a huge fan of Helena Bonham Carter, I still managed to enjoy this movie. She was amazing, as always, and the rest of the actors were great, as well. This definitely wasn't Helena's best movie, but it still wasn't that bad. I couldn't really say how this movie was in relation to E.M. Forster's novel, but I wouldn't ever mind reading the novel if I could ever manage to find it.

I gave this movie 6/10 stars on imdb.com.