A Man for All Seasons

There are types of movies you won't find genre labels for on a streaming service. They're labels without defined characteristics, but you know them when you see them. A lazy Sunday afternoon veg-out movie (something mindless and full of movement, like Commando or Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure). A filling-out-the-schedule-of-an-indie-TV-station-at-3-in-the-morning movie (almost certainly a forgotten mid-tier release or a box office bomb, like Catwoman or The Adventures of Ford Fairlane). A Man For All Seasons is a PBS Masterpiece Theatre movie. Unmistakably British, dry as the Gobi, stage-like acting. Your appreciation for Seasons will largely depend on how well you react to these factors. This is not a Jane Austen period piece, with teary romance and melodrama galore. This is historical in nature, a retelling of the final years of Sir Thomas More, a British nobleman during the reign of Henry VIII, who refused to co-sign on Henry's divorce from his first wife and split with the Catholic Church and endured banishment, imprisonment, and execution for it. I like learning about history I don't know, and a movie is a great way to impart that knowledge. But Seasons dropped the ball for me by not filling in a lot of blanks. It has no interest in contextualizing the intricacies of the British monarchy and the court in the early 16th century. What was he before becoming a Lord Chancellor? What IS a Lord Chancellor? Don't know, and the movie isn't interested in explaining it. Seasons only breezes by the recent Protestant reforms, barely mentioning Martin Luther directly at all. The most critically missing context of all, though, is the central question of why Henry VIII cared so much about More's approval of his divorce, and why he'd promote More to the position of Lord Chancellor when he knew More wouldn't approve. None of this is explained or explored, not in the least because Seasons is entirely More's story, told from his point of view. We've all heard the stories of Henry VIII's mercurial nature and irrational whims, but that's not enough to explain why he had such an unceasing vendetta against one man, especially after that man had been stripped of his nobility. The movie's staging didn't help endear itself to me either. As much as I despise West Side Story and Chicago as movies, there is an inherent flow to them, a liveliness to how they are filmed that make it feel like more than a stage-to-screen adaptation. The camera moves, the people move, the scenes transition from one another as any other movie would. A Man For All Seasons is so rigid in its stage-like presentation, you can almost hear the stagehands setting up the next set while the current one is going on. The camera has little movement to it, mainly zooms and dollies. It is a collection of sequential scenes without any connective tissue outside of the narrative itself. Actors walk into a room, say their lines, and then hard cut to the next scene. There is no passion to be found in Seasons, either behind the camera or (with the exception of Henry VIII's brief appearance) in front of it. Most everyone, especially Thomas More, is stoic to the point of needing a pulse check. I did a little research just for my own curiosity, and More was such a devout Catholic, he thought Protestants should be burned at the stake. That is a man of deep, driving passion and belief, and that is nowhere to be found in this movie. I'm sure it was excised so that there was some sympathy to be had for More, but even showing him passionately defending his beliefs against the accusations instead of stoicism and using clever wordplay against everyone would've injected some life into this textbook of a movie. I do appreciate that the movie isn't overly flowery or Shakespearean with its language, and the costumes are amazing. But I was bored to tears by this movie. I wanted to be sucked in, to watch Thomas More's defiant stance against a mad king, a contest of wills wherein a man stands by his beliefs and dies for it, and the king kills the man but never breaks him. That is a story worth telling and worth watching. A Man For All Seasons is not that story. It is stuffy and allergic to show any emotion whatsoever.