Point of View

Point of View

Straightforwardly Traditional

Like Thomas More himself, the narrative technique in this movie is straight-shooting. It's not looping all over the place with flashbacks or people suddenly talking directly to the audience. It basically tells its story from beginning to end. It focuses squarely on More, but it occasionally jumps outside the world of which he is directly conscious (for instance, showing Cromwell meeting with Rich alone).

There's also no voiceover, except at the very end, when we're informed about the fates of More's persecutors.

This film's screenplay is actually a pretty big departure from the play. In Bolt's stage version, there was a character called "The Common Man" who played various characters and who commented on the action directly to the audience—a Brechtian technique called the "alienation effect."

Bertoldt Brecht liked to do things like this in order to remind the audience that they were watching a play—i.e., it isn't real; it is art with a message you need to think about. He didn't want people to get lost in the play emotionally, and the "alienation effect" was a way of shoving them back a bit so they could also consider it on an intellectual level.

But, like we said, they thought that was unnecessary for the movie version (we agree), and Bolt cut it.