Director Sam Yates's production is definitely a slow-burner, but the slow reveal of the play's intricate patterns is deliberate, finding both the poetry and the drama in the seemingly banal.
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Sam Yates directs with due care but, for all its perceptiveness, I felt Lonergan’s play would work even better on the screen.
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Matthew Broderick excels in Kenneth Lonergan's play...The actors play characters that range from laugh-out-loud funny to twisty, wrong-footed ambivalence
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So, not a starry mess. But it's hard to be sure what the play is really about, and the languid approach makes for three hours of nebulous theatre.
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There are laughs, real ones that you remember, but you have to wait for them. The whole star-studded affair is almost three hours long but I didn’t even notice and, for me, that is saying something.
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Kenneth Lonergan's Off Broadway play trades heavily on deadpan as it crosses the pond.
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But there is a smart, poignant existential drama somewhere inside ‘The Starry Messenger’ that struggles to escape the black hole of Lonergan’s indulgent impulses.
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My own final verdict? Broderick fans will need to see this but it’s so low-heat the staff at Wyndham’s don’t need to worry about switching on the air-con this summer.
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