I adore this film!
I couldn’t even tell you how many times I’ve watched it and the cinematography, the score, the acting and the story are absolutely wonderful. In this 1983 film, Tom Conti (who I was lucky enough to meet and gush over about it while getting him to write a letter of support for a theatre company I was involved in setting up at the time) plays Gowan McGland, a womanising, alcoholic Scottish poet on tour in New England. At turns incredibly sad, poignant, hilarious and joyful, it looks at the downside of being a seeming genius, and the frailty of the human condition. It also has some of the best speeches about the joys of reading slowly, the complexity (or otherwise) or poetry, and getting old and drunk. It’s a fantastic study in how a character can be complex and convincing without spelling out every single beat, and can be likeable without being heroic in any way, and to paraphrase a scene, being a shit and knowing he is. It’s based in main on the novel of the same name by Peter de Vries (also great), and loosely and thematically on the american tours of the poet Dylan Thomas. It also features the debut film appearance of Kelly McGillis, who is better in this than pretty much anything she did subsequently.