Still Life: A Three Pines Mystery (2013)

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Beloved school teacher Jane Neal (Bronwen Mantel) takes an arrow through the chest in the first scene. The murder mystery in the small community of Three Pines gives us lots of suspects and twists in what appears to be an old fashion mystery.This is a made for TV film made in the part of Quebec where a community of poets, artists, and gays all speak English and nothing as vulgar as French. Once I got over that part, I noticed the characters were rather bland. They had good lines and roles, by the acting and directing was second rate. The guy I had pegged for the killer, wasn't it...but I was close. The clues lead us everywhere like a good mystery.The film had potential. Worth a view for fans of TV mysteries.

This looks like a low budget, whitewashed version where the producers were unfamiliar with the actual story or characters. Louise Penny has created a memorable group and place in Three Pines, but these actors are all 20 years younger and at least 40 lbs thinner than the characters they play, prettier, and entirely lacking in the qualities that make the characters memorable. Even Three Pines is all wrong - it's supposed to be off the beaten path, on a hard to find, unmarked, unpaved road, glimpsed from the top of a mountain as you descend into the valley below. Particularly awful are Clara, who's far younger than her Louise Penny character and lacks the insight and spontaneity of that character; Myrna, who's supposed to be a retired, 60-something, overweight black woman, who also lacks the compassion & experience that she's written with, and Gamache, who's ten years younger and a less imposing, authoritative or compassionate figure in every way. It's as if the GOP or Fox News were in charge of casting - everyone's got blow dried hair & bleached, capped teeth. Blech!

I wanted to like this movie, having read all of Louise Penney's atmospheric, intelligent, introspective books featuring Armand Gamache. How disappointing to find that all that has been reduced to soap opera standards. There is in the movie none of the sensitivity, insight, philosophizing that makes the books so compelling. The cast is impossibly good looking, with that plastic, every-hair-in-place, perfect make-up at all times look so common to made-for-TV movies. The characters, instead of being complex and unpredictable, are stilted, their utterances short, too fast, emotionless--a sign of poor direction and/or poor acting. The use of that husky, almost-whisper voice (who talks like that?) also betrays the cookie-cutter approach to this movie. Scenes are very short, pushing the plot ahead in only the barest, least thought-provoking manner. It's a shame to see Penney's deeply thoughtful works reduced to such shallowness. It was peculiar, as well, to see what Penney describes as the surreal, provocative artwork of murder-victim Jane,(thus killing off a main and recurring character in the books) represented as poorly-rendered American Primitive. Have the producers/director no loyalty to the books at all? If Penney is one of the executive producers, as referred to in other reviews, I cannot imagine that she feels the movie faithfully represents her literary work. I doubt, too, that she had much to say about it.

What a disappointment, Inspector Lynley goes to Quebec and is still having problems with his wife.Having read most of Louise Penny's books based in the Province of Quebec I expected the dialogue to be in English but English as spoke by a Francophone in Quebec. I have grown weary of Inspector Lewis, Miss Marple, Poirot, etc. based in upper class English settings. The Chief Inspector Gamache series is much more interesting based in Quebec with all of the Francophone influences. Surely there are enough English speaking Francophone actors in Canada to fill out the roles. Even the actor playing Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir is apparently fluent in French, wow, couldn't come up with an accent.What a shame that none of the Quebec atmosphere survived the film making. Just another English who done it.