Waterland follows the story of an anguished English-born Pittsburgh high school teacher (Jeremy Irons) in 1974 going through a reassessment of his life. His method is to narrate his life to his class and interweave three generations of his family’s history.
The film portrays the history teacher’s narrative in the form of flashbacks to tell the story of a teenage boy and his mentally challenged older brother living in The Fens of England with their widowed father. In an opening scene the teacher’s childless wife (Cusack) takes a child from a supermarket and believes it to be hers. The teacher explains to his class how he and his wife had a teenage romance which led to a disastrous abortion that left her infertile.
The teacher is tortured by the guilt of this as well as the jealousy he demonstrated to his older brother when he suspected his girlfriend’s child was his brother’s. The girl’s flirtation with the older brother sets off events that lead to the older boy’s death by drowning. A side-theme is the teacher’s grandfather, who was a successful brewer and who fathered with his daughter the narrator’s older brother.
Waterland is a 1992 British mystery drama film based on Graham Swift’s 1983 novel of the same name, directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal, and stars Jeremy Irons, Sinéad Cusack, Ethan Hawke and John Heard. The film, presumably to meet the needs of the US market, moved the contemporary location from England to Pittsburgh and eliminated many of the extensive historical asides.
Waterland (1992)
Directed by: Stephen Gyllenhaal
Starring: Jeremy Irons, Sinéad Cusack, Ethan Hawke, Lena Headey, Grant Warnock, Callum Dixon, Sean Maguire, Ross McCall, Camilla Hebditch, Maggie Gyllenhaal
Screenplay by: Peter Prince
Production Design by: Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski
Cinematography by: Robert Elswit
Film Editing by: Lesley Walker
Costume Design by: Lindy Hemming
Art Direction by: Helen Rayner
Music by: Carter Burwell
MPAA Rating: R for sexuality and language, and for an abortion scene.
Distributed by: Fine Line Features
Release Date: October 30, 1992
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