Reception
One reviewer, Michael Fox of jweekly.com, wrote:
- Sixty-five years on, and despite her legendary stature, Anne Frank still comes across as a willful, normal teenager with unrealistic — and tragically unrealized — dreams of her future. She attaches supreme importance to her own whims and needs, demands immediate satisfaction and musters barely an iota of tolerance for what she perceives as the stunted, compromised world of adults.
- As it unfolds, however, the British television adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank” increasingly and irresistibly frames its subject’s willfulness as a determination to establish an identity, and a place of significance, in the soon-to-come postwar world... It is the pitiless snuffing of this potential — the dream destroyed when the Gestapo breached her family’s Amsterdam refuge in 1944 after two long years in hiding — that is, and has always been, the piercing tragedy of Anne Frank’s life.
- Solidly engrossing and vigorously paced, “The Diary of Anne Frank” takes place almost entirely (after the first five minutes) in the secret annex above Otto Frank’s warehouse and office. It confines itself to the events recorded by our unintentional heroine — which is to say that younger viewers unfamiliar with the Nazis’ systematic, continent-spanning implementation of the Final Solution aren’t provided with a great deal of detail.
- Anne Frank has long been an icon to Jews and a symbol of the Holocaust to non-Jews, but I suspect mainstream audiences will view this version a bit differently. In the current era, when children die in every corner of the world and “ethnic cleansing” has become part of our vocabulary, Anne’s story provokes associations with racism, persecution and lost promise that go beyond Nazis and Jews.
- This production also has a more contemporary feel thanks to a shockingly candid scene where Anne acknowledges the changes in her body and admits her confusion over puberty. This was one of the passages regarding Anne’s sexuality that Otto Frank removed before the diary’s original publication in 1947, and which were restored in an edition published well after his 1980 death.
Read more about this topic: The Diary Of Anne Frank (TV Serial)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)