Wright’s Anna Karenina takes liberties by inventing a picnic that the screenplay by Tom Stoppard suggests is “a lovers’ idyll, by a stream on a warm day.” The picnic episode isn’t Tolstoy’s. As far as I know, there aren’t any...
In June 1939, FDR entertained King George VI and Queen Margaret at a picnic in Hyde Park, New York, his “other” White House. The picnic is significantly fictionalized. Michell and screenwriter Richard Nelson add much to the story but omit Eleanor...
The picnic scene is not Ford’s. It is the creation of White and Stoppard to demonstrate that Christopher’s excruciating relationship with Sylvia is no picnic. In episode 2 of the series, Christopher and Sylvia spend a country week with and attend a picnic on the grass...
Gilliam’s Zero Theorem is a sexy, pleasantly ordinary picnic. Except it is virtual, taking place in Qohen’s computer program and placed there by his horrid boss to make him work, work, work. The picnic is a romp on the tropical beach with a virtual sex...
Chadwick’s picnic is perfunctory and idealized. Chadwick and his screenwriter William Nicolson liked the idea of a lovers’ picnic because the narrative needed a romantic interlude. Mandela’s autobiography does not mention a picnic during his...
Hogg says that Archipelago is a metaphor for a family just out of touch with one another; “The title relates to the family as a group of islands, linked together beneath the surface. What often links a family together goes unspoken and unacknowledged. Families are a...
For six hours and 17 minutes, Tom Harper’s War and Peace is a parade of armies marching or in battle, explosions, mutilations, death, love and seduction, incest, and constant social intrigue. The final 2:8 minutes is a picnic, a happy situation, if not a fairy tale...
For the picnic, Victoria, and Abdul, Stephen Frears jokes that it is typically English and glum. Unwilling to be put off by an oncoming thunderstorm, cold, and wind, Victoria insists on picnicking amid heath. It’s uncomfortably cold, and Victoria and fellow picnickers...
Mixing fact with fiction, Danièle Thompson (very) loosely retells the complex friendship of Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne in Cézanne et Moi, especially how Cezanne helped Zola see from a painter’s point of view. Though they were childhood friends in Aix and later...
There are two picnics in Gerwig’s Little Women: a wedding picnic and a beach picnic. The first is Meg March and Mr. Brook’s reception. As in Alcott’s novel, it’s “a plentiful lunch of cake and fruit, dressed in flowers.” But Gerwig’s foods include wine, lemonade, and...
