Weeping for a Bad Movie
Leila (Francesca Annis - Dune), a complete and utter diva, is having a rough time of it as she is stuck making a movie she doesn't want to do and is being plagued by anonymous, threatening phone calls. She is also upset over her marriage to Ted (Daniel J. Travanti - Find My Child) as she suspects there might be something going on between him and her sister Elisabeth (Kristin Scott Thomas - Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming). When Leila is found drowned there are numerous suspects but the main suspect is her husband Ted.
So once again I find myself tackling a TV movie which is adapted from a Mary Higgins Clark novel, something which because of my surprising fondness for TV movies I have done a few times. But unlike some of these adaptations "Weep No More, My Lady" is one which is set and filmed in Europe and has that distinctly 90s European look to it. For some that will add to the movie's charm but for others it will distract and sadly I am in the second group as the cold look of "Weep No More, My Lady" was one of many distractions which did little to impress me.
In fact the storyline going on in "Weep No More, My Lady" did little to impress me either as whilst I have never read Mary Higgins Clark's original story what we get served up in this movie is just an ordinary murder mystery about a murdered movie star. There is nothing to it which grabs your attention or grips you with excitement and ends up being mundane as it offers up a series of characters that all could possibly have been behind the murder. And that is where the movie struggles the most because it gives us characters that all end up suspects but never gives us real reasoning why they should be suspects.
Now I like the three stars in "Weep No More, My Lady"; Kristin Scott Thomas, Daniel J. Travanti and Francesca Annis but their performances in this are ridiculously over the top. Each of them seems to be playing their characters as if they are part of a soap opera especially Annis whose attempts to make Leila a diva borders on the hysterical.
What this all boils down to is that whilst I don't know how "Weep No More, My Lady" compares to Mary Higgins Clark's novel I do know that as a movie it fails. It not only lacks character development but a lot of over acting which combined with a dull storyline make it hard work from start to finish.
