Has anyone watched the PBS movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch, The Child in Time?
I have so many questions…
Yes I watched it. Quite the tear jerker at times.
I didn’t think things were explained very well.
Why did Charles all of a sudden go off the deep end?
Why did the prime minister want info on Charles?
What was the deal with Stephen’s mother and then Stephen himself seeing the little boy?
It seemed all over the place. Situations that went nowhere. Parts were good - but too many things that were never explained or finished.
I saw it and felt it was overly concerned with being ‘artistic’ and not enough concerned with being coherent. Haven’t read the novel, so can’t say it that’s where the fuzziness comes from.
One point I think I did understand (maybe): the mother was seeing her as-yet unborn son Stephen, while Stephen was seeing the son who was being born to his estranged wife at that very moment, in the hospital to which he was traveling on the Tube (I think.)
Yes your spoiler is exactly what I got about that. Charles going crazy was a bit more convoluted. I think it had to do with the child disappearing, he felt it to the point of salvaging his own childhood. He knew too much about the prime minister, so had to be stopped. They left out some important details about the kidnapping itself, I think.
The circumstances of the kidnapping really took me out of the story. I won’t spoiler this as it’s the whole premise of the story and happens early:
Britain has been known for many years now for having CCTV pretty much everywhere in its cities, and the grocery store would have had its own cameras–particularly near the checkout lines where the child was looking at books/magazines, when taken.
The story had not one line to explain how there were NO images of the person taking the child—there must have been. Both in the store and outside the store. The place was busy but it wasn’t a machine shop–a child crying out would have been heard.
The whole thing was just so wildly implausible that I had trouble treating the rest of the story with any seriousness.
Yes, I kept thinking the camera pix would be shown with a cloaked figure grabbing the kid and the plot would go around and around trying to identifying who it was. But, then we jumped ahead in time. And the school girl incident happened. I still think something was missing.
Even if the novelist and screenwriter(s) were making a point about jumping ahead in time, the parents would still be, at the very least, interested in the question of ‘who took her.’ It made no sense that they would just get all philosophical about it. The film implied that they spent no time thinking about what must have been an intensive police investigation.
I’d think that any parent in such a situation would have mental pictures of the CCTV images recurring to his or her mind quite frequently. But we were asked to believe that these parents just accepted the child’s disappearance as some sort of random incident–as something they just had to move past. That seems an odd attitude (to me).
I don’t mean to argue anyone out of watching it; the performances were good and the whole thing was a professional production. But I wish the story had been worked out more plausibly.
The parent’s apparent lack of interest in an investigation contrasts nicely with Broadchurch, where the death of a child scars the parents for three seasons. As Sherred pointed out, at least say something about all the CCTV cameras. If this was in the US, I think they’d still find a few cameras that would get investigated.
The novel was written in 1999 - perhaps CCTV wasn’t that widely implemented at that time (but I assume it was).
Charles going crazy: did he write the report about childhood literacy for the PM, have great misgivings, and go into hiding and regressing to atone for his sins? That’s the only way it would make sense to me.
As an American, what I liked about the show (and others such as Broadchurch) is the look inside the domestic lives of people in Britain - the store, the house, the streets. That’s the kind of stuff lots of movies overlook.
Yes, do watch. It’s still a good story. Benedict was great. The actress who played his wife was in Gosford Park, with Maggie Smith. She played the Irish maid.