Word: apted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...McKellen, we'll have you know--and he will too--is not an old man, though you wouldn't guess that from his two new movies. He plays the frail, 67-year-old movie director James Whale in Gods and Monsters, and a Nazi near 80 in Apt Pupil. "People must think I'm in my 70s," he says with a sigh. "My danger is being typecast older than I am." But that, ladies and gentlemen, is Acting. Sir Ian is a lithe 59, two years junior to Redford, Nicholson, Hoffman. He doesn't care to be cast forever...
...scene midway through Apt Pupil, Kurt Dussander (Ian McKellen) tosses a stray cat into an oven. The cat, of course, escapes, to wild cheers from the audience. This scene, while not profound or even endurable, epitomizes Apt Pupil. As in almost any drama, the villain is far more interesting than the "hero," who is likely asleep while our villain is drinking Old Crow, listening to opera and amusing himself by throwing cats into ovens or something. Of course, as in any Hollywood film, the one inviolable taboo is that no matter how many humans are gruesomly murdered, an adorable...
...such, Apt Pupil would seem to be a thriller that hovers somewhere between tolerable and entertaining. What's troubling, though, is that Dussander is a former S.S. officer, and this cat in an oven acts as an obvious metaphor for the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, the reference here being a blatant and almost nauseating one to Nazi gas chambers. If far more carefully done, a movie could perhaps have succeeded in making people understand the horrors of the Holocaust in visceral terms, for it is certainly a shockingly emotional event that is all too easily...
King is also responsible for the psychosexual themes that run underneath what is, in its way, a sort of "coming of age" tale. Our hero, however, does not go from foolishness to wisdom but from good to evil, and this is perhaps the most problematic aspect of Apt Pupil. The key line in the movie perhaps comes when Dussander, at a dinner party and unflappably suave, says, "Speaking the truth is a privilege of young boys; it is one, however, that men must regrettably relinquish," raising his glass knowingly to the other men at the table. Lying, suggests Apt Pupil...
...with a movie that suggests that the world is an evil and corrupt place where the men who realize this play dirty and survive while all the others are naive babies: Chinatown, The Godfather and a number of other fine movies create this kind of world. The problem with Apt Pupil, of course, is not its structure but its subject, suggesting that a former S.S. agent is knowing and mature while the Todd Bowdens of the world, striving after justice, are hopelessly naive. Toward the end of the movie, a Holocaust survivor spots Dussander, who, it turns out, killed...