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Reaching for the Moon's uptight sensibilities sometimes play more pretentious than poetic, but solid performances and sumptuous photography leave a lingering longing for love in the tropics.
All Critics (35) | Top Critics (11) | Fresh (23) | Rotten (12)
Attention is retained by the commendably unhistrionic leads, who convincingly etch the pair's enduring devotion even when passions run dry.
The life of American Poet Laureate Elizabeth Bishop furnishes surprisingly vivid emotional material in Reaching for the Moon.
It's hard not to admire the intentions of a movie that depicts two exceptional women living exactly the way they wanted, together, outside the expected societal norms of the time. But the tone of the film itself feels unfortunately conventional.
If Blue Is the Warmest Color is the gloriously messy supernova of this year's lesbian dramas, this is the J. Peterman catalog version: elegant, tasteful, and two-dimensional.
Its strength is its two beautifully observed complementary performances.
The atrociously sentimental score is an irritant, but the performances are solid.
Despite the film doing some clunky biopic things, Otto gives this more than enough reason enough to fly down to Rio.
A resolutely melodramatic film that feels engagingly old-fashioned as it revels in its lesbian love-triangle storyline.
I really enjoyed the first three quarters of the film and then not so much the end.
Brazilian actress Gloria Pires is a real dynamo as the extroverted Lota, and yet she navigates through the darker, fragile moments well. Meanwhile, as the WASPish, reserved Elizabeth, Australian actress Miranda Otto is a standout.
Opulently shot and designed, full of spectacular, tourist brochure-style imagery of Brazilian buildings and landscapes, the film teeters on the edge of novelettish melodrama throughout.
As the essentially solitary poet, [Otto is] excellent, conveying at once a rich and complex inner life -- its details elusive perhaps even to Bishop herself -- and also a profound uneasiness with the world outside.
An irregular story, at times melodramatic and full of those clichés that plague most biopics (despite a nice speech scene that sounds relevant even today when it comes to dictatorships), with characters who seem like mere drafts and never become complex enough to make us care.
Super Reviewer
With her suffering from severe writer's block in New York City in 1951, the poet Elizabeth Bishop(Miranda Otto) decides, as her friend Robert Lowell(Treat Williams) would put it, to take the 'geographical cure' by traveling to Rio de Janeiro to visit her friend Mary(Tracy Middendorf) from Vassar. There, she finds but is not shocked by Mary being involved in a romantic relationship with Lota(Gloria Pires), a wealthy architect, who lives in the country. Then, Elizabeth literally and figuratively bites off more than she can chew, by beginning an affair with Lota, while Lota promises Mary a puppy, no wait, to adopt a baby if she will stay. Once upon a time, the director Bruno Barreto made a wild movie called "Dona Flor and her Two Husbands" about a unique relationship. Now, he returns with "Reaching for the Moon" which is also about an intriguing relationship(the movie could just as easily be called "Dona Lota and Her Two Wives") which is grounded in reality and a true story with relationships and performances that ring true.(In fact, nobody does flustered better than Miranda Otto.) At the beginning, Elizabeth seems inexperienced but gains confidence and grows as a person throughout the film. A lot of that has to do with her creative input and success, as the movie also serves as a fine look at the creative process, both poetic and architectural, with a fine use of modernist design.
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