Stephen Schiff

“….Vanessa Redgrave's Agatha lopes nervously through all this fusty glamor [sic] like a giraffe who feels conspicuous among the zebras. Dressed in flapper-style beads and hats and '20s clothes that gleam, she's never looked taller or more fagile, and you're always afraid that if someone startles her, she'll emit a loud crack and topple over. With her red hair frizzed out to the sides and her eyes a big and blue as robins' eggs, she's not the same color as everyone else, and she seems touchingly vulnerable.

But vulnerability is just about all there it to her. In the London scenes, we see her suffer stage fright at a luncheon held in her honor; we see her desperately throwing herself at ther heartless, irritated husband (played with splendid hauteur by Timothy Dalton) after he demands a divorce; and when the setting changes, we find her drifting through the health spa, still wide-eyed and tremulous. Could this bundle of nerves really sit down and write a good mystery? Redgrave's Agatha is little more than a cipher. It isn't love or sudden fame that's thrown her for a loop; she's loopy to begin with….

“… I could dismiss Agatha as a good-looking mess were it not for the bizarre romance between Redgrave's Agatha and Dustin Hoffman's energetic … Wally Stanton…. [T]hrough the subtlest of signals … Hoffman lets us know that Stanton is a bit of a sham…. In Agatha Christie, he recognizes a sensitivity, a talent, an aristocracy he can only pretend to, and feminists of every stripe will enjoy watching this self-satisfied man-about-town humble himself before the awkward, retiring housewife he considers his intellectual superior … [T]heir solemn, unerotic liaison turns the film into a touching comedy of manners. Both have assumed false identities … [T]heir tender exchange of lies makes for a sweet, courtly pas de deux, a minuet to the music of the Charleston. Stanton's fibs appear scientifically planned; Agatha's sound spontaneous and macabre. In one witty, revealing duet, they both make up stories about their dead spouses; his, he claims, perished of a perforated ulcer; hers, she blurts, was cleaning a rifle and accidentally blew his head off. But the romance's crowning touch is, of course, the difference in their heights. Hoffman is always gazing reverently up at Redgrave; she, in turn, seems clamly aware that his head is less apt to be lost in the clouds. When she finally bestows a kiss upon him, her long neck rolls and cranes downward while Hoffman fairly quivers with anticipation. It's a magical moment. We feel almost as if we were privy to an arcane mating ritual in the peaceable kingdom: the flamingo stretches to kiss the eager seal. The actors may not be able to give Agatha's plot the momentum it sorely needs, but the romantic chemistry they brew out of disparities and oppositions takes your breath away.”

Stephen Schiff
Boston Phoenix, date ?