Waterland [1993]

Tom Crick (Jeremy Irons) is a withered history teacher whose students don't find his lessons on the French Revolution worthwhile. So instead, Tom spends class time telling his students about 30 year-old family skeletons he's trying, hopelessly, to forget. Though he shares them with his students, Tom's problems are wholly intimate: his wife, Mary is on the brink of insanity due to painful memories that haunt her. But as Tom continues to talk, he goes further and further back in time, narrating a personal and social history filled with jealously, madness and death.