Word: aunt
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...aunt's dinner table this Thanksgiving, there was an empty seat that was once filled by a wonderful...and innocent boy," he said...
...children from playing on the enclosed porches for fear they will be shot. Inside, there are rats in the incinerator shafts, cockroaches in the hall and a stench in the elevators. "Robert Taylor ain't no future for no one," says Lasonya Evans, 20, who lives here with her aunt. "People have stopped dreaming. They don't have no more dreams...
...stripped down to the essentials, of James's plot. In turn-of-the-century London, a well-bred but impoverished young woman, Kate Croy (played by the matchless Helena Bonham-Carter), is confronted with conflicting demands of a secret engagement to a penniless journalist (Linus Roache) and a wealthy aunt who wants her to marry well. Into the midst of this crisis sails Milly Theale (Alison Elliott), an ingenuous American visitor who--in true Jamesian form--happens to be encumbered with an enormous fortune. Milly becomes friends with Kate, but also falls in love with Kate's fiance, Merton Densher...
...film focuses exclusively on this triangle, somewhat at the expense of the supporting figures. Kate's aunt Maude, Susan, Milly's chaperone and caretaker, and Lord Mark, Merton's rival, such pivotal and richly complex characters in the original novel, are here reduced to merely functional roles. Fortunately, the three principal players have more than enough presence to command one's entire attention, and Softley's cinematic style--heavy on facial close-up shots, the only method by which he attempts to reproduce James's constant psychological probing of his characters--plays off every shade of expression in their looks...
Still, the cast and crew of the Lyric Stage display a broad-based and almost unimpeachable craftsmanship. Besides the major characters, all of whom are poignantly acted with psychic ambiguities intact, Hogan allows her supporting characters to shine. The full-blooded humanity of Ferrini's Aunt Elizabeth or Bobbie Steinbach's Mrs. Montgomery are intrinsically satisfying, but also serve to highlight Catherine's comparative sallowness...