A FORTUNATE MAN no stars

Atrocious; not so much the film itself, (it's tolerable), but the fact that it's been dubbed into English or rather 'American', which makes what could have been a silk purse into something like a sows ear. It's based on a novel by the Nobel-prize winning author Henrik Pontoppidan about an ambitious, social-climbing young engineer in 19th century Denmark and it's certainly a handsome looking period piece directed by the gifted Bille August but it's also very long, (it lasts almost three hours), and in this dubbed version you never really get a feel for the performances. (There is a subtitled version available so catch that if you must see it at all). It's the kind of noble, starchy affair that plays out like an abridged mini-series which, of course, it was. There's a four part television version, too. Despite its efforts to be a fully-fledged epic I found the material dull though in the end it's those accents, and dialogue that sounds like it came from a dime-store novel, that scuppers it and makes this a very long three hours indeed.