Maybe I’ll just read the book

Dana Stevens at Slate takes a look at Empire Falls so maybe we won’t have to. The review is titled “A River Runs (Very Slowly) Through It – Empire Falls is a genteel, beautifully acted bore,” and begins:

Now that sweeps month is over and the big network shows have had their season finales, the quality-TV baton passes back to the cable networks. Empire Falls, a nearly four-hour-long adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo, premieres this weekend in two parts on HBO (Saturday and Sunday at 9 p.m. ET). Directed by Fred “A dingo ate my baby” Schepisi, Empire Falls is one of those HBO prestige projects, like last year’s Angels in America or The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, that movie actors have been jostling each other to be cast in (perhaps in part because the shooting and promotion schedules for television are less punishing).

The cast list is as crammed full of goodies as a gift bag at an A-list Hollywood party: Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Ed Harris, Helen Hunt, Aidan Quinn, Philip Seymour Hoffmann … and that’s just in the major roles. Every crossing guard in this movie seems to be played by a well-known and gifted actor, including Estelle Parsons as a crusty bartender and the wondrous Teresa Russell, too long absent from the screen, as a sexy waitress. Yet despite a half dozen near-perfect performances, Empire Falls never quite catches fire, perhaps because it’s scripted by Richard Russo himself, who makes the fatal mistake of turning great swaths of his 500-page novel into a third-person voice-over narration.