GurlyIamBeach
Instant Favorite.
Kamila Bell
This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.
Juana
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Marva
It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,
Paul Evans
The Politician's Husband is a very enjoyable three part mini series, which delves into the murky world of Westminster, the backstabbing and willingness to sell anyone out to get to the top, at the cost of anything and anyone.The story is good, if I'm absolutely honest I think it started better then it finished, Part one promised a tale of revenge and seething jealousy, we got it for the most part, but I felt a little short changed in the concluding episode. Plenty going on, at times a little too much, it's almost as if they tried cramming in to many twists, au pairs, drowning children etc. The acting was extraordinary, very much The BBC at is best, Emily Watson and David Tennant both fantastic, and worthy of their individual statuses as superb talents. A word also for Jack Shepherd, Ed Stoppard and Roger Allam, all excellent.I applaud them for giving us a Political drama, a genre are starved of on British screens, it's a good story, with amazing performances, it just perhaps loses a little focus in the end. Worth a look though, 8/10
Michael Last
The Politician's Husband featured a fantastic performance by David Tennant as the manipulative politician and husband. I thought Emily Watson's performance was decent, but her character seemed a bit one-dimensional. This could have been due to how the character was written. Either way, the story was engaging from start to finish. The side plot involving their home life and special needs child was engaging, and I believe would have been the perfect instrument to properly end the mini series.*Spoilers Below This Line* After the death of Aiden's father, Freya makes plans to take the kids away so that her husband can collect his things and move out of the house. As he sits at the kitchen table, distraught from all of his recent losses, his son (diagnosed with Aspergers) slowly approaches and hands him a toy, before leaving the room. I think this would have been the best way to end the series, as it finished the parallel between Aiden and his son Noah. Earlier in the episode, Aiden's father had remarked how Aiden was given a son who was incapable of deception, and that he (Aiden's father) was given one to whom it was second nature.To have the series end with Noah trying to show compassion or empathy for his father (which is exceedingly difficult for a child with Aspergers), it would have highlighted Aiden's own selfishness and tied a neat little bow around this drama.Instead, the next few minutes revealed a startling "twist", where Aiden and Freya have been named Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister - the final reveal being that Freya is actually the one elected as PM. While it's a fun thought, it was a little too unrealistic for me. It didn't seem to match the rest of the story.Regardless, this is still one of my favorite political dramas so far.
trimmer31
Let me preface this by saying that David Tennant's portrayal of Aiden was masterful and, while I feel Emily Watson was poorly cast here, her effort as Freya was very well done, as well.However -- either the writing was weak, or this was a 6 hour miniseries cut down to three. So much is missing. So much is there and makes you ask yourself, why?The son... what role does he play? Having a child with challenges like this, there was so much character development, for the child as well as for his parents, that could have gone on around this story arc that... didn't. The daughter? Other than the fact of the existence of children in the home (and the nanny being a presence), there is little development here. Many of the plot lines simply... end... without any closure. What happened with the nanny? What happened with the son's challenges at school and elsewhere? What was the purpose of Aiden's father's death? I feel that this could have been so much better, had only they taken the time to tell the story in more depth, or not left so many arcs hanging. How do you go from "I'll take the children away so you can move out," in one scene, to arrival at #10 as an obviously estranged but "united front in front of the cameras" power couple in the next? As I said, the story, while brilliantly acted, was choppy; either poorly written, or half of it is still laying on the editing room floor.
siderite
As fan of David Tennant's and Emily Watson's work I couldn't pass on the opportunity to watch this miniseries. In a way it reminded me of Secret State, but it was less flamboyant while being a lot more visceral. This is the story of a successful politician who gambles on his way to power. He loses, allowing his wife, until then staying in his shadow, and his backstabbing friend to rise to the top of the political hierarchy. As a result he cannot stop plotting to get himself back to where he has fallen from, only losing everything else on the way up.A nice cautionary tale, a criticism of the political system in Britain (and everywhere else, really) and brilliant acting. The problem with the story, though, was that one could not sympathize with any of the characters. David Tennant's interpretation of an obsessive politician is brilliant, but who can really identify with it other than the psychopaths that enter politics in the first place?Bottom line: a good movie, but at one moment I couldn't wait for it to be over and the finale was not really something that inspired me.