Harper’s archery picnic is faithful (more or less) to George Elliot’s Daniel Deronda. It’s a picnic archery meeting for women only. Elliot uses the sport as a metaphor for gender relationships. Archery is a variation of the goddess Diana hunting, except here, the...
Altman’s fall shooting party and lunch in Gosford Park is a metaphor for social rot in English aristocracy and their servants circa 1932. The pheasant hunt takes place on a cold rainy day in October at which the lord of the manner, Sir William McCordle, brutally...
It’s unknown if Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash ever picnicked. His biographer Sylvia Nasar doesn’t mention any. Undeterred by the lack of biographical information, Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldman invented a picnic to add narrative...
It’s unknown if Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash ever picnicked. His biographer Sylvia Nasar doesn’t mention any. Undeterred by the lack of biographical information, Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldman invented a picnic to add narrative...
Ali’s family picnic is outwardly happy but inwardly troubled. After twenty years, Nazneen’s marriage to Chanu Ahmed has gone wobbly. She’s never loved Chanu, but at the time of the picnic, she’s conflicted by guilt and lust-fueled by Karim, a Muslim political activist...
Some aficionados of Ulysses remember the picnic at which Molly, then Marian Tweedy, seduced Leopold Bloom at a picnic at Howth Head around 1888. The lovers traveled to the outskirts of Dublin, where they made love among the wild rhododendrons and ferns. It is a...
Payne’s film Sideways has three picnic episodes, none of which are in Rex Pickett’s novel Sideways. The picnic first is Miles Raymond’s memory of a vineyard, wine, and food. He recalls that he and his ex-wife used to like this view. “Once,...
Whether or not Barry and the Llewellyn Davis family picnicked in Kensington Park (or any park) is moot. Assuming they did, Forster’s Finding Neverland, with a screenplay by David Magee, fictionalizes three picnics that mark significant moments in Barrie’s...
Sideways is a slice of life in Miles Raymond’s midlife crisis. Rex Pickett’s novel and Payne’s film fail to distinguish whether Miles is a sad sack or a creep. Though there aren’t any picnics in Rex Pickett’s novel, Payne invented three...
Locke’s story “Ladies in Lavender” does not have a picnic. Dance thought better and wrote a beach picnic on the coast of Cornwall into his screenplay. The story is simple. Ursula and Janet, spinster sisters, well on in years, live in a cottage by the sea near the...
