Written by: Stephen Karam
Starring: Annette Bening, Saoirse Ronan, Corey Stoll, Elisabeth Moss, Mare Winningham
Rating: [2.5/5]
Humans have the tendency of letting a little sexual desire cause major messes, even if it involves people they love. History has shown this to be the case time after time making the events occurring in The Seagull to be nothing necessarily surprising but still rousing in its own way. However, despite the promise of the material, it fails to truly leave a mark as something worth remembering outside of the performances at the center.
One summer, aging actress Irina Arkadina (Annette Bening) pays a visit to her brother with her lover Boris (Corey Stoll). While there she witnesses the tumultuous relationship between her son Konstantin (Billy Howle) and his lover Nina (Saoirse Ronan) and how it begins to bleed into her own love life.
A bunch of artists brought together for some drama at a summer house has all of the makings for something seeking to entertain. Emotions all over the place and then you consider the stages each of these characters find themselves in within their own lives and there should be a final product worth taking in. Considering the feature also comes as a direct adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play of the same name it had so much promise. With all that being said, the history of bad to mediocre films comes rife with unfortunate circumstances where ingredients to a good recipe look fairly decent but the final product nets something not worth writing home about. This unfortunately proved to be the case for The Seagull.
As someone who will literally watch paint dry if it involved Saoirse Ronan, it hurts to see when the film around her does not measure up to what she can do as an actor but unsurprisingly she does very well here. Encapsulating this young ingenue she demonstrates the complexities of what occurs on an emotional level for her and how she gets pushed and pulled by the other artistic minds around her but something remains lacking in everything else around her. All of the other actors do just fine around her but the story struggles to leave anything remotely impressionable by the time the final credit rolls.
The story and message at the center make sense and delivers a moral quandary about the messiness of these characters but the way it all comes together shows this feature did not have the juice to take something meant for the stage into anything remotely visually compelling. It leaves these actors waffling to create all of the energy and drive to push everything forward with no help from their surrounding elements. Laying blame must come down to the direction and how it fails to take an intriguing story with some strong actors but fails to muster it into something that can be deemed a success.
You have this love triangle at the center that should bring some intrigue and controversy when you have a woman who has a man for a lover that begins to fall for the young woman her own son is dating. Plenty to certainly unpack there, especially when it shows the difference between the aging Irinia, young Nina, and emotionally troubled Masha (Elisabeth Moss). The potential messiness at the heart of this story does not get the time to shine as it deserves and it ultimately feels limp as a result. For something meant to be concise and with a relatively short runtime it also somehow overstays its welcome solely from the fact it takes way too long to come around to what it truly wants to say and evoke through its story.
Truly one to forget even if containing its own merits, The Seagull falls into the basket of films that needed more time to bake before pulling it out into a film. It also unfortunately serves as another example of a play adaptation not succeeding in bringing something meant to be 2D in its nature into something more visually dependent like a feature film. This feature has nothing to necessarily hate but it certainly does not provide much to like as a whole leaving it in this weird in-between where it just exists as something very mediocre. A feature you will forget shortly after watching except for remembering there’s a strong cast doing some decent work here.
Films with Josh 
