As the ending credits begin, we're told that A Simple Twist of Fate was "suggested by the George Eliot's Silas Marner," a Victorian novel written in 1861. The movie was written by Steve Martin, and he also served as the Executive Producer. As far as I can tell, it was a box-office flop. It grossed just $3 million during its limited engagement run, and production cost certainly ran somewhere around $10 million.
No one, in other words, was clamoring for modernized retelling of Silas Marner.
Well, it's been 30 years, but I have actually read that novel, and when I decided to watch this film, it was just because I'm watching Steve Martin movies this year, and I had no idea that the movie had a Silas Marner connection.
Martin studied philosophy in college, and he does seem to have a passion for the classics, including Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac and William Shakespeare's Hamlet, etc.
All that's well and good, but how does this one work as a movie? In the beginning, Michael (Martin) is a married schoolteacher. His wife comes to the school one day after classes are over, and hands him an envelope. Inside is a paternity test. He is not the father. They divorce, and the film jumps ahead.
Now Michael lives in a rustic country setting. Nice place, too, considering he only brings in $15,000 a year woodworking. As little as he makes, he's still able to buy and horde gold coins. Some evenings, he likes to line up vodka shots, get stinking drunk, and admire his coins. He can even shuffle the coins like playing cards.
April (Catherine O'Hare) works at the antiques store. That's where Michael buys his coins. She might be the only friend he has in this small town, a place where everyone seems to know everyone's business.
They apparently don't know John's (Gabriel Byrne) business. He's a local politician who had a golden-haired child out of wedlock.
Long story short, Michael ends up raising her for the first ten years of her life, and the film sprints through those ten years. Meanwhile, John's career is going okay, he has a wife that can't have children, and his problematic brother (Stephen Baldwin) -- the one who somehow knows Michael has coins and so steals them -- has disappeared. It seems like John lives right next door to Michael, and he's trying to get to know the daughter he abandoned. Eventually, he even takes Michael to court, but his daughter wants to stay with Michael.
I've noticed that when Roger Ebert writes a review, if he's not too into the film, he'll often write summaries. When he likes a film, though, he'll have other stuff to fill the review with. Isn't that interesting? Maybe my reviews are the same way. I didn't hate this movie, but as Ebert said in his "At the Movie" TV show review of this film, trying to tell Silas Marner in a modern American setting is just a little odd and doesn't completely work.
On top of that, I never feel like I get to know Michael. Is he just a poor, angry, lonely, miserly man? I think there's a lot more to him than that, but the film doesn't show us. It allows us to let him be that stereotype, but honestly, what we do see of him raising his daughter shows us a lot more, which is why it's somewhat confusing.
The court scene when John's lawyer has Michael on the stand is weird, too. Yes, Michael got divorced when his wife was pregnant, but it's not the same as John abandoning his daughter, because Michael's wife wasn't carrying her husband's child.
It's such a sharp jump from the paternity test scene to the "5 years later," too. What was Michael's real reaction to his wife's news? How did that divorce go? Why did he leave teaching for woodworking? So many unanswered questions.
Final thought, the movie is hard to classify. I guess Drama, although IMDb labels it as Drama and Comedy and Coming of Age. Does this film know what it wants to be? Will John have a relationship with his daughter even if he didn't get custody, and so on.
Rating: 2.5/5 stars
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