Review of Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning (2008) by Lia R — 13 Oct 2009

First of all, whose bright idea was it to kill off Gilbert Blythe?! That's just WRONG. That being said, there's nothing particularly awful about this film (great scenery, solid acting), though the story is convoluted and jumps around a bit much for my taste...so long as you can get over the glaring omission of the title character herself. I don't blame Sullivan for wanting to return to magical Avonlea, but he really should've changed the names and called the film something else entirely. Even "The Continuing Story" (Part 3) was tolerable and that was only because Megan Follows and Jonathan Crombie returned as Anne and Gil (their reunion scene in war-torn Europe was nearly enough to make me forgive the film's deviation from the books). If they wanted to continue the thread from Part 3, they would've been better off with a loose adaptation of "Rilla of Ingleside", the final book of the Anne stories which focuses on her children.

My single biggest problem with this story is that it re-writes history: Anne Shirley is an orphan, it's a fact that shapes her indelibly. Her parents died of fever when she was a baby and she later revisits their old home (in Anne of the Islands). Anne has no memory of her parents though she loves them dearly and subsequently names two of her children after them (Walther Cuthbert and Bertha Marilla Blythe if memory serves). She does not, as this film suggests, make up the story that she is an orphan (Walter Shirley did not indirectly kill his wife in a wagon accident and become a guilt-ridden absentee father). Anne was imaginative, yes, but she was not a liar. It's also out of character and very difficult to believe that Marilla Cuthbert would ever hide Walter Shirley's letters from Anne. As it is, this installment is Anne fan fiction minus Anne and minus the magic. Perhaps someone with lesser attachment to L.M. Montgomery's Anne Shirley Blythe can appreciate "A New Beginning". Unfortunately, I could not.