EADWEARD 106 minutes. See Movies. Rating: NN
Eadweard Muybridge – born Edward Muggeridge – was a strange fellow whose obsession with photographing subjects in motion with multiple still cameras led indirectly to the development of motion pictures.
Kyle Rideout’s Eadweard is a biopic that focuses on those efforts and the controversy Muybridge courted when he started insisting his subjects be photographed nude in order to reveal their posture. This did not go down well in the academia of the 1870s.
The script is (very) freely adapted from Kevin Kerr’s play Studies In Motion: The Hauntings Of Eadweard Muybridge, but Rideout and producer/co-writer Josh Epstein frame Muybridge’s life as a series of Heritage Moments, all debates and eurekas.
Eadweard is beautifully shot and makes the most of its settings – Rideout is also the film’s production designer – but the dialogue is utterly on-the-nose, and the performances are all over the place.
As Muybridge, Michael Eklund seems to be using There Will Be Blood’s ferocious Daniel Plainview as a template, which would be more impressive if his accent didn’t drop every time he raises his voice. And though Sara Canning’s Flora is written as a progressive woman, she’s maybe a little too modern to fit into the staid and formal 1870s envisioned in the film.
