Lindsay Duncan's lean yet luminous face will draw you in to the story of The Rector's Wife. Anna Bouverie (Duncan, Rome) chafes at her limited life as a vicar's wife in a small English town. When her husband Peter (Jonathan Coy, from the Horatio Hornblower series) is passed over for a promotion and her daughter is bullied at school, Anna gets a job at a supermarket in another town--a small act of independence that sets off gossip, domestic fights, and worse. When Anna meets another man who seems to understand her frustrations, she stumbles into an affair. The Rector's Wife, in its broad outlines, combines a romance novel plot with feminist themes, but its real strength is the richness of the characters, both in the writing and the performances. Duncan's performance is wonderfully three-dimensional and seemingly background character keep popping out with vivid details (Prunella Scales, Fawlty Towers, and Pam Farris, Rosemary & Thyme, have great scenes). This four-episode mini-series is sort of a British version of An Unmarried Woman--less concerned with psychology and more attuned to the social pressures of a small town, but nonetheless an engaging portrait of a woman struggling towards independence. --Bret Fetzer
The deeply moving drama of one woman's rebellion against convention. Lindsay Duncan (Under the Tuscan Sun, A Year in Provence) delivers a formidable performance as Anna Bouverie, a 20th-century woman trapped in her role as a vicar's wife in the English village of Loxford. Arranging church socials, delivering the parish newsletter, and answering the rectory's endlessly ringing phone, Anna feels stifled by her marriage and her circumstances. "I married the man, not the job," she pleads. "I'm not an outboard motor. I'm another boat!"
Anna's first tentative steps toward self-definition meet resistance from her increasingly distant husband as well as from patronizing parishioners. But when two other men in her orbit offer their support —and perhaps more—Anna must sort out their real motives and make her choices.
Also featuring Miles Anderson, Stephen Dillane, Pam Ferris, Ronald Pickup, Joyce Redman, and Prunella Scales. As seen on Masterpiece Theatre.
DVD SPECIAL FEATURES INCLUDE Joanna Trollope bio and cast filmographies.
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