Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning is a mini-series television film, the fourth and final film in Sullivan Entertainment's Anne of Green Gables series. It was released in 2008 on CTV. Before the broadcast, CTV had recently acquired the rights to the entire Anne catalogue including the 1985 miniseries.
The film stars 14-year-old Hannah Endicott-Douglas as the child and Barbara Hershey as the adult Anne Shirley. Shirley MacLaine plays matriarch Amelia Thomas in the film. Kevin Sullivan wrote a completely new screenplay for the three-hour movie based on Montgomery's characters (serving as a prequel to his early 3 miniseries movies broadcast originally on CBC) and not directly from her books. The story follows Anne's life before she arrives at Green Gables.
Video Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning
Plot
Anne, now a middle-aged woman, is troubled by recent events in her life. Her husband, Gilbert, has been killed overseas as a medical doctor during World War II. (This did not happen in the books.) Her two daughters are preoccupied with their own young families and her adopted son Dominic has yet to return from the war. When a long-hidden secret is discovered under the floorboards at Green Gables, Anne retreats into her memories to relive her troubled early years prior to arriving as an orphan at Green Gables and being adopted by the Cuthberts.
The impact of this difficult period has a far-reaching effect on this older woman, once she discovers the truth about her real parents. She begins a delicate search for her birth father. It is a journey through a past fraught with danger, uncertainty, heartache and joy. In the parade of humanity Anne encounters, she also faces the root of her desire to find true "kindred spirits" and an imagination to use her talents as a writer to inspire others.
Maps Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning
Release
The telefilm premiered on Sunday December 14, 2008 on CTV; it was broadcast in high definition. In the United States, it has aired on various PBS stations since November 2010. The film has a running time of 138 minutes. It was released on DVD on May 5, 2009 by Sullivan Entertainment. The company also published a soundtrack, first available for download on January 8, 2009 and then on CD on June 16, 2009.
Prior to the film's debut, Key Porter Books published a novelization of the film by Kevin Sullivan in October 2008.
Cast
- Shirley MacLaine as Amelia Thomas
- Rachel Blanchard as Louisa Thomas
- Barbara Hershey as Older Anne Shirley
- Hannah Endicott-Douglas as Younger Anne Shirley
- Ben Carlson as Walter Shirley
- Natalie Radford as Bertha Shirley
- Ron Lea as Gene Armstrong
- Kyra Harper as Nellie Parkhurst
- Joan Gregson as Hepzibah
- Vivien Endicott-Douglas as Violetta Thomas
- Patricia Hamilton as Rachel Lynde
- James Carroll as Jeremiah Land'
- Colleen Dewhurst as Marilla Cuthbert (non spoken cameo in flashback)
- Megan Follows as Anne Shirley (archive footage at beginning of the film)
Production notes
All of the movie's actual location photography was shot in various places around the Toronto, Ontario area, using existing houses, streetscapes and natural environments. Period mansions were used as the backdrop for the Thomas residences, and an historic Quaker Boys School converted into the Bolingbroke Poorhouse for the film.
When they could not film on location, the production crew and special effects team employed the technology of the green screen and CGI to digitally create the background, or specific details that location filming could not produce.
Of the major cast members from the original trilogy of films, only Patricia Hamilton reprises her original character in the fourth film, with Hershey taking over the role from Megan Follows though Follows appears as Anne towards the beginning of the film in archive footage. Archive footage is used to allow Colleen Dewhurst, who had appeared in the first two miniseries and Road to Avonlea, and who had died in 1991, to appear in a flashback cameo. For the role of young Anne, Sullivan held a cross-Canada open casting call in July 2007, including submissions from YouTube, before Hannah Endicott-Douglas landed the part.
Reception
In its debut on CTV, the film was watched by 1,042,000 viewers, a number that was seen as low compared to Sullivan's earlier Anne productions.
The film was not well received by critics or fans. The Globe and Mail's Kate Taylor said the film, "never justifies its presumption in inventing a new creation story for a Canadian literary icon." Bill Brioux felt that "maybe Anne just doesn't age all that well. Maybe she is supposed to stay in freckles and pigtails, locked in that perfect P.E.I. prism Montgomery authored and Sullivan so artfully adapted when they both were in their 20s." The film currently holds an audience score of 36% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 5.5 rating on IMDb.
See also
- Before Green Gables, a prequel novel published in 2008.
References
External links
- Official page on Sullivan's Anne of Green Gables series
- Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning on IMDb
- L.M. Montgomery Online This scholarly site includes a blog, a bibliography of reference materials, and a complete filmography of all adaptations of Montgomery texts. See, in particular, the page for Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning.
Source of article : Wikipedia
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