According to our Netflix "shipping activity" we watched
The Letter as recently as October 2012, but neither of us remembered doing so. While we were viewing it, I did recognize a few scenes, but James never saw anything that jogged his memory. In this slow moving film, Our Winona plays a playwright / director who is slowly sinking into mental illness. She is unable to tell fantasy from reality, and the audience winds up with the same problem. Many scenes are virtually silent, without even a music soundtrack - a bold choice in direction to be sure, but ultimately it just really makes it hard to stay awake. A good movie to watch if you have insomnia.
We like metafiction and even meta-metafiction, but in this case, the play-within-a-play unfolds in such a tentative, mumbling fashion that it does not reward the viewer's attention. As with many of Our Winona's films, there is an element of sexual tension, as an erotic impulse in the non-story is brought close to the edge of her limits of on-screen chasteness. Unfortunately, this occurs late in the film and through too many layers of separation to be of much interest.
Final verdict: 2 croquet balls
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