Five Little Pigs (2003)

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Best movie ever!

As Good As It Gets

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Unlike some of the adaptations of Christie' s Poirot, this was very true to the novel. There were a few melodramatic moments in this production that were not true to the novel but they were minor.This is one of the Christie novels where the characterizations were at the heart of the tale. The close-up of all the major characters showed not only how much they suffered from the events of the past but how hollow they had become. It seemed, even in death, the husband and wife were more dynamic than those who orbited around them.The acting was fabulous and Suchet' s Poirot showed subtlety and charm and happily, few of the affectation s he sometimes employed with his quarry and I think Rachael Stirling,as Caroline Crayle was first among equals.This show affected me greatly and won't soon be forgotten.

This is one of Dame Agatha's more engaging conundrums, though not exactly the kind of acute examination of "the psychology" that Hercule Poirot (David Suchet) claims it is.Let's see. There is one of those perfervid painter-types, Amyas Crale, a Byronic figure, married to a good-enough wife but having one affair after another. He drinks a glass of beer and drops dead, poisoned in the proper British manner. The deed seems to have been prompted by Crayle's announcement that this time his love affair with his model (Julie Cox) was serious and he intended to shrug off his marriage and replace his wife with his model. The wife is convicted and, without any protest from her, hanged. That was fourteen years ago. Now, the daughter is convinced of her mother's innocence and hires Poirot to investigate.So who did it? Well, there were only about half a dozen people present at the isolated rural mansion at the time of the murder. Was it Crayle's best friend from boyhood (Toby Stephens)? Maybe it was Meredith, another boyhood friend who is always skulking around and who, after all, had a collection of chemicals in the basement, the poison among them. Or maybe it was Crayle's own daughter, blinded in one eye by her mother years ago, killing her father in order to frame her mother who is the obvious suspect. Might it not have been Julie Cox, the model he was apparently about to marry? But, no. What motive would she have for killing her lover? Could Crayle's wife actually be GUILTY? Or was there some stranger out of the past who sneaked in and did the dirty deed? Well -- not that. Because all of Agatha Christie's plots involve only the suspects who are around at the time of the murder.Now, I'll tell you who did it. (Not really.) I enjoyed this more than most of the movie-length episodes in the series for a couple of reasons. One is that there was no subordinate or embedded crime, irrelevant to the murder itself, that might have thrown the plot off kilter. None of the suspects is a closet jewel thief or anything. It's a nice clean mystery. Second, I could tell the characters apart. As always, they're introduced with a name and a phrase and we're given a two-second shot of the suspect's face. But this time there seemed to be fewer suspects, and they LOOKED different from one another. Toby Stephens I already recognized from "The Great Gatsby" TV production, which should have been called "The Great Blunder." The others had some visible distinguishing characteristic -- the beard; the disfigured face; the great enormous stupendous colossal raccoon-like exopthalmic eyeballs of Julie Cox, the model, who looks as if she could eat a normal human being alive by nibbling him to death with her pupils. I haven't read the novel but I imagine some modernization has gone on. The artist and Toby Stephens, as it turns out, were more than just friends during their boyhood.David Suchet IS Poirot, giving a shaded performance much different from his splashier big-screen counterparts.I admired, too, the tale for having a moral behind it. Van Gogh, Modigliani, Toulouse-Lautrec, Jackson Pollack, and the rest notwithstanding -- one should never drink while trying to paint. Not unless you want your model to turn up with three breasts.

Finally! I've now seen all of the feature length installments of the Poirot movies featuring David Suchet. And wouldn't you know it – the last one I watch just happens to be one of the best of the entire series.Five Little Pigs, which happens to benefit from staying fairly true to Agatha Christie's original work (at least as best as I can remember), is a poignant, gut-wrenching, and beautifully filmed movie. As Christie did in her novel, the mystery is told though a series of five interviews that flashback to that fateful day when a murder was committed. Director Paul Unwin handles this portion quite nicely. I was worried about all the hand-held shaky-cam, but it works well for the iffy memories of events of fourteen years previous. Even though I knew the outcome, I thought the mystery elements were well done. I think someone without knowledge of the plot would really enjoy this part of Five Little Pigs. The acting, other than the abysmal performance of Aimee Mullins as the adult Lucy, is more than acceptable. By now (or by 2003 at least), Suchet has grown in the role of Poirot to the point that I cannot imagine anyone else even attempting to do the character. Two other real highlights for me were the music (it's quite beautiful) and the photography (there are some gorgeous landscape shots throughout the movie). All together, an 8/10 seems about right by me. Had the adult Lucy not been so distractingly poorly played, I could have easily rated Five Little Pigs higher.

'Five Little Pigs' could have been a tricky novel to dramatise. Most of it is set in the past and as a result there is little 'action' but this adaptation is very well done indeed. By this time, David Suchet IS the definitive Poirot and it's difficult to imagine anyone else playing him. The flashback sequences are beautifully handled and very atmospheric; the 'ageing' of the characters superbly done. Indeed, I have to admit to feeling very foolish to discover at the end that there were two different actresses playing young and older Angela - I was quite convinced it was one actress doing a really spectacular job - they looked SO alike! The cast is almost perfect I think except perhaps Aiden Gillen who (in my opinion) doesn't quite convey the magnetism and charisma of Amyas Crale - he's a bit ordinary. The modern Christie's (the new Poirots and the McEwen Marples) can be fairly criticised for overplaying the gay card and in this adaptation at least one of the 'Pigs' has been made into a gay character (it might be argued that Miss Williams' intense love and admiration for Caroline could constitute a second) but in this case I think it has done little harm and the central plot remains untouched. There is also an overly melodramatic finale but overall this remains one of the best of the Suchet Poirot films.