Script: My House in Umbrage

My House in Umbria. Picture it: Italy, several strangers sit on a crowded train compartment. Suddenly, a bomb goes off, blowing up their compartment. The survivors awake in hospital, shaken but determined to put their lives back together. A washed up romance novelist, played to perfection by Maggie Smith, invites the other survivors to convalesce at her house in Umbria. The police inform her that they suspect one of the passengers in the compartment of having either been the intended victim of the bomb, or planting it. It could very well have been one of the people now staying at her home. And Amy, a young American girl whose parents died in the accident, doesn’t remember anything prior to waking up in the hospital. Or does she?

Sounds like a great, contained environment with a mystery adding heat to really simmer things up to a boil and draw out some good character spice, right? Not so much. The characters are compelling, and you can’t beat Maggie Smith, but for some reason the film abandons this great premise. No one really seems to care who planted the bomb or why, or what's going on with this Amy kid. Instead, Maggie spends all her time trying and failing to seduce Amy’s fuddy-duddy uncle who has come to collect her. There are some great moments, but I can’t help feeling that this story probably worked a lot better in its original novel form.

A film audience has a lot less patience. You need to use your strong, compelling plot to draw out all the great character stuff, otherwise it’s like having yummy character icing floating around without any plot cake to put it on. It’s just kind of annoying and sticky. I know I always harp about how important characters and their development are to a story, and I stand by that. But their development has to be motivated by a strong plot, otherwise we’re just spending two hours with really interesting people, watching them do – nothing.

I wanted to love this film, and the atmosphere and great performances certainly are engaging, but I kept wondering, why? What are we building to? What is driving anyone or anything in this film, if not the perfectly adequate plot of trying to determine who planted the bomb and what the heck is going on with Amy? If I don’t know what we’re going for, I can’t feel satisfied when we get there – because I don’t know we’ve arrived.

So, yeah. Maybe read the book on this one.