Word: boorman
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...John Boorman's family -- here called the Rohans -- waged and, from a semidetached house in suburban London, waited out the war against Hitler. Dad (David Hayman) joined the army. Mum (Sarah Miles) stayed home with the three children. The teenage daughter (Sammi Davis) discovered the romance of sex under fire. Her preschool sister (Geraldine Muir) held on to any available hand. And Bill (Sebastian Rice Edwards), Boorman's seven-year-old surrogate, was thrilled to pieces by the explosive newness of it all. A bombed-out house with all its booty! A Luftwaffe pilot parachuting into the neighborhood! If these...
...real boy soon found out. A director-daredevil in the grand British line of Michael Powell and David Lean, Boorman thinks there is still an empire, of traditions if not of global power, worth challenging and defending. Let smaller-souled men paint still lifes of kitchen sinks; Boorman is a muralist, with epic ambitions and a lust for impossible risks. He has spent his movie career navigating wild rivers (Deliverance) or cutting his way through jungles (The Emerald Forest), plunging into the mythic past (Excalibur) or the hallucinatory present (Exorcist II: The Heretic). Each film is an exploration...
...back home, he says, is more of the same -- the beginning of the same. Everyone in Hope and Glory may be English middle class, but Boorman sees to it that war soon turns the instincts feral. In the rubble of a blitzkrieg, children forage for ghastly souvenirs, and adults renounce a lifetime of propriety for some guilty, convulsive sex. But this is not a horror story, though there are horrors for the Rohans to endure. And though their ordeal was unusual, Boorman makes it close to universal. Every family lives in a war zone of its own circumstances and compromises...
...each director's distinctive style, music and image are indivisibly wedded. Remember a movie, and you can hear its music too. There have been five for Bernardo Bertolucci, including the ravishing 1900. Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers and Burn!, brimming with political conscience and passion. John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic, a witchy reverie of evil and redemption. Terrence Malick's edgy elegy to heartsick heartland America, Days of Heaven, took on the resonance of some dark folk ballad. And all Sergio Leone's pop-folk epics, from A Fistful of Dollars to Once upon a Time...
...happened before. Strong directors -- like John Boorman with The Emerald Forest and Roland Joffe with The Mission -- are drawn to shoot stories of strong men in death-defying jungle locations. They end up tracking their willful protagonists to death or madness, and the audience rarely follows. With all his art and effort, Weir is unable to enlist cogent concern for Allie Fox. One escapes from The Mosquito Coast as one might from a plague of the title insects, itching and irritable...