Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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praise the film’s imagery and point out the weaknesses in the narrative structure,
weaknesses which, due to budget constraints, were often beyond the control of the
filmmakers. John Downie argued that the disadvantage of “the assertion of the
visual/aural dimension in advance of the dramatic” in Ward’s work is that this
can reveal a certain blandness, a fear of confrontation and human complexity, an
over-reliance on the iconic and the schematic, a giving over of the human
richness of story to the allure of mere spectacle, a fact which comes even more
to the fore in his subsequent films, Map of the Human Heart and, with unctuous
sentimentality, What Dreams May Come. 876
An exception to this criticism of the narrative structure of Ward’s work was Mark
Tierney’s review in The Listener: “If there’s one ability that lifts Ward above most of
his contemporaries, it’s storytelling. His new film is absorbing from the first and holds
you easily for the next two and a half hours”. 877
John Maynard regards the film as being “a personal sort of novachenka, which is like a
spiritual and narrative take on the history of the twentieth century, of the clash between
the old and the new – two world wars and ways of seeing the world. Again, the centre
of it was a great romantic idea. It was a spiritual and ambitious movie”. 878 Other critics
also focussed on the Romantic nature of the film, but often interpreted Romanticism
negatively in its most populist sense. An example was Costa Botes: “Though the
cynical might claim that [Ward] is self-consciously living out the romantic ideal of the
Byronic artist hero, there is no denying that Ward will literally go to the ends of the
earth for an unforgettable image”. The reviewer was critical of the depiction of the love
story in the film: “What he draws on […] is a rather hackneyed romantic triangle that
seems to be mostly a pretext for elaborating on his story’s metaphorical conceits, rather
than being a particularly gripping or emotionally involving in itself”. 879 After the film
was shown as a work in progress in a non-competing slot at Cannes one critic noted that
the weaknesses in the love story stemmed from the cutting out of scenes from the script
876 Downie, The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey 29.
877 Mark Tierney, "Character and Pace," Listener 10 April 1993: 46.
878 Lynette Read, interview with John Maynard, 27 September 1999.
879 Costa Botes, "Ward Fails to Find the Heart," The Dominion 12 April 1993: 7.