Akiva Goldsman makes his directorial debut with Winter’s Tale, an epic New York City fantasy romance based on the acclaimed 1983 novel by Mark Helprin.
Goldsman won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for A Beautiful Mind (2001), and he is also known for his work on I Am Legend (2007) and The Da Vinci Code (2006).
Winter’s Tale — starring Colin Farrell, Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly and Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay — has an intriguing plot: “Set in a mythic New York City and spanning more than a century, Winter’s Tale is a story of miracles, crossed destinies, and the age-old battle between good and evil.”
Too cryptic for you? Here’s the Amazon description:
Mark Helprin’s ‘Winter’s Tale’
New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights, its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing exists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake–orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side.
Though he thinks the house is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the love between Peter Lake, a middle-aged Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young girl, who is dying.
Peter Lake, a simple, uneducated man, because of a love that, at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and besieged by unprecedented winters, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.
It definitely has a time travel element (fans of 1980’s Somewhere In Time, rejoice), which looks interesting but needs to be handled delicately and properly, lest it become cheesy (nonfans of Somewhere In Time, nod your heads).
Winter’s Tale opens appropriately on Valentine’s Day 2014.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91RiS_DA3BA]