Word: bergmans
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...code and a wardrobe of backless satin dresses. Throughout her 20th book, the author honors the great Late Show tradition: in Dodsworth (1936) Walter Huston sighed to Ruth Chatterton, "Did I remember to tell you today that I adore you?" In Casablanca (1942), as the Nazis marched on Paris, Bergman asked Bogart, "Was that cannon fire or is it my heart pounding?" Driscoll tells her lover, "It could never be as beautiful as this again. I want to remember it just as it is now . . . in my mind . . . in my heart." The screenwriters had actors to give their bromides life...
...sylph. She did not even pose for her most famous painting; the figure's torso is Betsy's. But the work was honest in its essentials, and it established Wyeth's world as a place of physical grandeur and psychic pain. No wonder Betsy compares her husband to Ingmar Bergman. The American painter and the Swedish filmmaker are both stern visionaries whose art is based not on effusion but on reduction -- experience purified, like the flayed skin of a penitent. Both document man's spiritual solitude. Both listen for the eloquence in things left unsaid, the static electricity in gestures...
...beginning of the movie shows a closeup of Rose's eyes. She has just received her first pair of glasses which she hopes will give her "cheekbones and character" or at least make her look a little more like Ingrid Bergman. The end of the movie is also a close-up of Rose's face and we're supposed to see the difference. However, not enough has changed to make things interesting and not enough has stayed the same to make a statement...
...attempts to revive the form. This year's example is Social Security, the bawdy but bland story of a Manhattan art dealer (Marlo Thomas), her suburban sister (Joanna Gleason), their respective husbands (Ron Silver and Kenneth Welsh) and the aged mother who drives them crazy (Olympia Dukakis). Playwright Andrew Bergman has written lustily funny movies (Blazing Saddles, Fletch), but he places only ticktock jokework on the stage. Worse, he creates situations of real pathos and then anesthetizes them. The matriarch is 80, unable to get around without a walker, unwilling to be left alone for an hour. By the play...
There are the makings of a play in the resentment between the housewife, who nurses the mother, and her sister, whose answer to everything is writing a check. But Bergman settles for stale attempts at satire about city dwellers vs. suburbanites, trendy vs. square relations, rich vs. poor ones. The actors struggle to give the play life, but there is only one moment of insight. As Thomas' ever irreverent husband, Silver says, "I'm flip, which is another way of being shy." Perhaps that is Bergman's problem, and it is surely the problem of a weary genre: plenty...