Review of The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) by Rebecca H — 04 Dec 2008

What this film has going for it is a revolutionary premise - a fictional character choosing to leave his film and enter the real world, and not one, but TWO Jeff Daniels. Can't get much better than that.

Unfortunately, that is ALL this film has going for it. It visibly stretches to fill a whole film with one idea, and at only an hour and 15 minutes, with a lot of that pointless filler, it doesn't succeed. The main character, Cecelia (Mia Farrow), is both annoying and boring and it's difficult to really care about her, while her dialogue, sounding an awful lot like improvisation, isn't interesting. And the dreary direction leaves much to be desired, like focus.

Cecelia's life sucks so she becomes obsessed with films, which makes it harder to cope with her sucky life. Then Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) steps off the screen to tell her heâ??s in love with her, and then the actor who played him, Gil Shepherd (also Jeff Daniels) turns up, also to fall in love with her. Only neither relationship is developed, so it's not convincing. And there's no reason for the rushed underdeveloped flatness. With this premise, you could do anything. But Woody Allen doesn't. He doesn't do anything with it. He just has Cecelia endlessly say this isn't like real life because real life sucks and then that's the ending.

The first time I saw this I was so swept up in the amazing and revolutionary premise that I found the downbeat ending soul-destroying. But this time I was objective. I noticed how short and underdeveloped the story is, and how much I don't care about Cecelia, and so when the ending rolled around, it was just annoying.

Jeff Daniels is excellent in his dual role and i'â??s upsetting because Tom is going to be destroyed, and but there just isn't enough here to make a film. If only the premise had been given to someone else, they could have made a classic.