Cinema: Windup Doll

A DOLL'S HOUSE

Directed by PATRICK GARLAND Screenplay by CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON

The famous door-slamming exit that climaxes Ibsen's once scandalous play about a bourgeois woman liberating herself from a claustrophobic marriage no longer shocks. The melodramatic blackmail plot in which she is ensnared for much of the time now seems a rather forced theatrical convention, not worthy of the playwright's thesis or a modern audience's interest. Its disclosure to her husband, which in turn exposes him as a hypocrite more concerned about his own status than his wife's reputation, seems both simple-minded and rather...