That said and out of the way, parts were good too. The cinematography for one, highly evocative of the era, sometimes in wonderful sepia tones. Richard Gere is woefully miscast, his one-note slow eye-blink performance quickly irritates, you just want to kick him into some kind of action. Here he is almost asleep, can barely finish a sentence and when he does one is left with a "huh?" He needs to be in stark contrast to the character of Jean played by Lisa Eichhorn and he seems to fade into her skirt in most scenes. I found the actor, Tony Melody, playing Jean's father creepy in the extreme, as if he was plotting a serial killer rampage. Most of the time he looked as if he wandered in mistakenly from the set of another movie. Unsettling. Rachel Roberts shines in her last part, full of nuance and repression. As does Vanessa Redgrave, sparking against the character played by the Kennedyesque William Devane, all teeth. A lot of the movie rang so false, the cake being delivered to Jean (a cake? in the middle of war? with a mother dying?)The trip to Ireland with not one square inch of Ireland shown, just the inside of a U.S. canteen. Even the ending is hollow and empty and not worth the amount of time invested in it at all. 5 out of 10.
Review of Yanks
