Fairytale: A True Story . Tucson Weekly . 11-03-97

Fairytale: A True Story

DIRECTED BY: Charles Sturridge

REVIEWED: 11-03-97

So which is it: a fairy tale, or a true story? If only director Charles Sturridge and screenwriter Ernie Contreras could make up their minds! As it stands, their movie is a meandering pile of nothing: neither magical enough to sustain children, nor thematic enough for adults. The facts of the 1918 spiritualist sensation--which occurred after cousins Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright photographed "fairies" outside their Cottingley Glen, England, home--are served up right alongside brief special-effects sequences that show actual fairies mindlessly frolicking. Peter O'Toole plays Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who'd become unhinged after the death of his son and desperately championed the cause of fairy belief. Harvey Keitel, of all people, plays Harry Houdini, an outspoken skeptic of such things. There's a conflict there, but the wussy filmmakers don't pursue it--they just want everybody to be happy so long as their delusions don't directly hurt anyone (never mind the value of truth for its own sake). The only way this movie could have worked is if the filmmakers had scrapped their "true story" pretensions and agreed to lie outright. That's what the little girls did, after all: In 1981 one of the women admitted the fairies were cardboard cut-outs they'd propped up with hat pins.

--Woodruff

Full Length Reviews
Fairytale: A True Story

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Fairytale: A True Story
Fairytale: A True Story

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