The Bridge Of San Luis Rey

Irish director Mary McGuckian's adaptation of Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer-winning novel about faith and fate, the third so far, captures none of the book's melancholy spirit. Peru, 1714: As religious pilgrim Brother Juniper (Gabriel Byrne) watches, the rope bridge over a gorge suddenly collapses, hurling five people to their death. Six years later, Juniper sits before a court of the Inquisition, accused of heresy. Exhibit A: The book he compiled about the five victims, in which he set down every fact, every anecdote, every apparently minor detail regarding their lives, in hopes of parsing God's divine plan from the intersecting paths that led these five and no others ...