Synopsis
A struggling young writer finds his life and work dominated by his unfaithful wife and his radical feminist mother, whose best-selling manifesto turns her into a cultural icon.
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Cast
- Robin WilliamsT.S. Garp
- Mary Beth HurtHelen Holm
- Glenn CloseJenny Fields
- John LithgowRoberta Muldoon
- Hume CronynMr. Fields
- Jessica TandyMrs. Fields
- Swoosie KurtzThe Hooker
- Brenda CurrinPooh
- Peter Michael GoetzJohn Wolfe
- Jenny WrightCushie
Recommendations
- 90
Variety
George Roy Hill’s film adaptation of [John Irving’s novel] The World According to Garp has taste, intelligence, craft and numerous other virtues going for it. - 80
The New York Times
If it was finally the book's whimsical side that endeared it to so many readers, the movie is missing none of that charm. If anything, it's got a little more...A gentle, intelligent film and an interesting one. - 75
Chicago Sun-Times
The movie version of Garp, however, left me entertained but unmoved, and perhaps the movie's basic failing is that it did not inspire me to walk out on it. Something has to be wrong with a film that can take material as intractable as Garp and make it palatable. - 75
The Associated Press
Robin Williams discards his Morkisms for a credible portrait of the fated hero, and the rest of the cast is remarkably good, especially Mary Beth Hurt as his wife, Glenn Close as his mother and John Lithgow as the transsexual former tight end of the Philadelphia Eagles. [23 July 1982] - 70
Chicago Reader
Nothing convinces, but the film is fitfully appealing. - 60
Empire
The script might have benefited from being directed by someone more daring, instead George Roy Hill settles for more mainstream territory. - 60
Time Out
Williams is cuddly enough as the man whose talents for nurturing a family are constantly undermined by a malign fate, and there is a performance of some dignity from Lithgow as a six-and-a-half-foot ex-pro footballer transsexual. But it's the kind of movie which is brave - or stupid - enough to ask the meaning of life without having enough arse in its breeches to warrant a reply. - 60
Washington Post
Williams, might have been more aggressive. Otherwise, director Roy Hill has done about as well as you can when translating word to image, not only through plot, but via the repetition of symbols: primitive, obvious ones -- the toad, a death's head costume, a child's clumsy drawings. After two hours and 20 minutes, all the parables and paradoxes join in a sluggish whole. And we wind up where we began, up in the air without a tail gunner. [23 July 1982, p.11]
