Word: captors
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NEAR THE END OF THE MOOR'S Last Sigh (Pantheon; 434 pages; $25), a madman holds the novel's narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, prisoner. The captor, an old but rejected friend of Zogoiby's late, flamboyant mother, demands a history of her family before killing its teller. "He had made a Scheherazade of me," Moraes writes. "As long as my tale held his interest he would let me live...
Only briefly does Beauty become affecting, when Belle and her captor, a prince transformed into a sort of buffalo, fumblingly get to know each other. Terrence Mann finds coltish gawkiness in a lumbering leviathan and suggests a new reason why the myth has endured. When the beast stops slurping and growling and starts thinking of cleanliness and manners, he evokes the civilizing process boys go through in adolescence as they discover girls. Mostly, though, the characters seem even simpler when played by actors than they did as cartoons. The costumes that help them resemble a candelabrum or a clock also...
...degenerate into an endless debate, going over all too familiar terrain, about the nation's thorniest ethical issue. But just when it seems that is about to happen, playwright Jane Martin turns out to have plenty to say about the antifeminist anger that may underlie much activism. The lead captor, a windy minister, appears to have trouble separating his concern for unborn children from his devotion to patriarchal authority. He keeps referring to himself as "the head of the family." He condescends unashamedly to the day-to-day keeper, a grandmotherly woman who is trained as a registered nurse...
...woods outside Belfast, a black British soldier (Forest Whitaker) wheedles a friendship out of Fergus (Stephen Rea), his reluctant IRA captor. Can Fergus kill a man he has grown fond of? And later, in London, can he live a mortal lie even as he falls in love with the soldier's darling Dil (Jaye Davidson)? Dil has a flirtatious manner, a capacious heart, an enigmatic smile and a lode of helpful truisms: "A girl has to have a bit of glamour," "A girl has to draw the line somewhere." These are emblems of traditional femininity, yet Dil is anything...
Like the other players, Grodin gives a nicely calibrated performance as the itch his captor cannot afford to scratch too vigorously. But it is De Niro's work that redeems an inherently improbable plot. He handles guns, quips and tight spots with the requisite elan. He brings something else to the part too: a deftly imagined sense of hard roads traveled before he hit this one, of a past lived, not just alluded to. When you root for him, you root for a man, not a killing machine...