Ethan Frome movie review & film summary (1993)

It is not that simple. As Mrs. Hale, the local landlady, retails old scandals to the Rev. Smith, we see in flashback a doomed love story. Many years earlier, Frome (Liam Neeson) married an older local woman (Joan Allen), who grew cranky and bitter, and was a martyr to her hypochondria. Frome labored to wrest a living from the hard land, and was relieved when a young cousin, Mattie (Patricia Arquette), came to work and live with them.

It is clear to us, and soon enough to Frome, that Mattie likes him.

Frome is at first too conventional, and too dominated by his wife, to make a move. But finally, after a church dance, he realizes he has lost his heart to her, and they fall in love. They even, in fact, spend one evening in perfect happiness, before the avenging Mrs. Frome banishes the girl from the farm.

And then, in a famous scene that had great popularity at the time of the book's first publication, Ethan and Mattie are punished for daring to be happy, and their brief moment of paradise turns into a lifetime of penance.

As a novel, Ethan Frome can grow on you, because of Wharton's quiet passion. This movie version, however, doesn't find a cinematic equivalent of Wharton's style, trusting that the story and the acting will interest us. The problem is that the story, simply as a story, is a forlorn and cheerless morality tale. We drag our feet on the way out of the theater or make unkind jokes about poor Ethan.

Neeson, in the title role, is an effective actor who in movies as different as "Darkman" and "Husbands And Wives" has shown a wry intelligence.

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