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Equus
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Customer Reviews
Rating:  - A WORK OF ART
EQUUS is one of those plays you never forget after you see it. Although the theatrical version is matchless, this film adaptation succeeds in bringing into the widescreen the painful drama of these two characters who represent - in many aspects - the torments of modern society. Brilliantly interpreted by Burton & Firth, this is a theatrical adaptation not to be missed. Due to the brutal explicity of some sequences, it sounds understandable that a good number of viewers may feel shocked and tend to underrate the whole piece. I think this play - although written in 1973 - has a lot to say about us, about modern society, sexuality, religion and existential values. Give it a try and reflect upon it once you see it.
Rating:  - Disturbing and terrifying
This movie lacks all imagination that could have been put into the production. There is just a lot of male nudity and gore, and eerie sexual tension between the boy and his horse.
Rating:  - "I Am Yours and You Are Mine."
A young man (Alan Strang played by Peter Firth) blinds a half dozen horses with a spike and sings as his response to queries when hauled in front of the magistrate. He must be nuts, the thinking goes, and suitable mental health is sought.
Richard Burton's character, Dr. Martin Dysart, doesn't just try to help his severely neutrotic and psychotic patients, he often leads them in a dysfunctional romp through the nethermind and disregards ordinary boundaries.
"Why me?" Dysart asks the referring professional when requested to involve himself with this particularly difficult, horse-maiming patient. She's already told him once, but he wants to hear it again, maybe in a new way. The answer is naturally because he's the best. He doesn't argue.
And so Dr. Dysart sluthes his way through the mind of young Alan, through his broken Stepford mum and embarrassed, muttering dad, and through the evidences of a life that not only has taken the road less travelled, but has gone crashing through the underbrush of a dark, sharp wood where no one else goes.
When Alan awakens from a nightmare to see Dysart standing above him, he wasn't the only one who wondered, WTF? In fact, Dysart's apparent conversion from general shrink to field forensic psychiatrist who just happens to be everywhere he needs to be was just a little odd. His obsession with the Strang case, however, became understandable.
Firth was excellent in this, the best part actually. I was afraid after the introduction that Burton's Dysart would be overwrought, but he settled into it well enough with occasional relapses into overacting. The complex repressed sexual themes were interesting and this film will probably appeal to fans of Burton and people interested in well-written tales of the mentally ill. I also appreciated the connection between Dysart's persistent and disturbing dreams in light of the work he did. I enjoyed this film, although it was a bit ponderous at times with Dysart's later various prolonged existential crises.
Rating: - Once it gets rolling... pow!
Equus (Sidney Lumet, 1977)
I have to admit that at first, I was kind of unimpressed with Equus. Richard Burton narrating the first dream bit... it just didn't work. It seemed overdone, the symbolism was way too naked, this just wasn't Peter Shaffer. No subtlety. No tact. For that matter, come to think of it, this wasn't Sidney Lumet, either. It was about ten minutes later, during the bit where Alan Strang (Peter Firth) is relaying his first experience with a horse, that the movie really fell into place. I think that has a great deal to do with Firth and not nearly as much to do with Burton, though he does grow into his role as the movie progresses. Firth, on the other hand, gives a powerful, terrifying performance from the get-go here. His mentally disturbed Strang is a perfect fit for Shaffer's celebrated meditation on the potential damage of the mixture of sex and religion. And while Equus, thanks in no small part to its slow, unworkable beginning, never quite reaches the heights of Dog Day Afternoon or Twelve Angry Men, but it remains a powerful and disturbing film, once it takes off. And take off it does.
The cast entire do a very good job here. Joan Plowright is almost as distressing as Firth, despite being supposedly sane, while Colin Blakely plays her blustering, ineffectual husband excellently. Jenny Agutter (once again fulfilling her role as, in the immortal words of Jeff Murdock, "an advertisement for nudity!") makes a perfect love interest for Strang, teasing and coy, but willing to take the upper hand when necessary, while Burton, once he warms to the role, makes a fine psychotherapist. But what sets this apart is Lumet's interesting decision to keep Alan Strang at the same age in his flashbacks, rather than taking the more conventional choice of casting six-year-old and twelve-year-old actors to play earlier versions of the sixteen-year-old Strang; the scene I mentioned earlier, where Strang recounts his first experience with a horse, is just monumental. While it probably would be had they cast another character, by keeping Firth, the scene also gains an unsettling quality of imbalance; you know he's supposed to be six, but there he is, still his adult self. Amazing stuff.
The subject matter, in today's political climate in both Britain and America, is probably deeply unpopular; if anything, that's even more a reason to get your hands on a copy of this at your earliest convenience and indulge yourself. ****
Rating:  - Obviously a stage play adaptation
I have torn feelings over this movie. Some of the acting, especially Richard Burton with his soliloquies, was gripping. At the same time... soliloquies says something too. This felt like a stage play adaptation. There are lots of long speaking bits and very few settings. I'm not against adapted stage plays, but this didn't feel like a movie, and it's strong points made me more curious about seeing it as a play than anything else.
Equus unfolds from a therapist asked to analyze and work with a teenage boy who had a seemingly normal life, who suddenly and for no apparent reason gouged out the eyes of several horses at a stable where he worked part time. The therapist, meanwhile narrates about his dreams and oddities, and finds in the teen parrallels to himself. The movie is as much about the therapist as about the teen.
Something that for me was weak about this movie is that it seemed to be trying way too hard to be sexual. The teen is naked in approaching half his scenes. He rides horses naked. He stands naked next to horses and pets them during some long narration. He falls back completely naked into blackness in some type of visual methaphor over and over again during some long narration. He gets naked in therapy, which I'm assuming is OK only because this is set in England, and therapy is run differently there. Beyond the copious nudity, some of the language is, once again, over the top. In a flashback showing his quirks preceeding the blinding, he's whipping himself (probably naked here too) and screaming some type of geneology for Equus (his personal god). This geneology is a bit over the top as most of it reads like "Pankus begat Spankus... Spankus begat Equus." Seriously, "Spankus" is in there.
I recommend avoiding this movie, although maybe be open to it as a play. Turning it into a film certainly didn't add anything, and altough this has some good acting, it seems at best as if it's trying to hard.
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