Word: charming
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Civilization aspires to femininity. History has made man's age-old tools of muscles and marauding nearly obsolete; it urges him to put down swords and pick up phones, to value salon charm over brute force, to face adversity through nurturing and networking instead of a quick body chop. What a lovely evolution: men are becoming women. Except in movies, of course -- especially summer movies, where the O.K. Corral never closes and the footfalls of dinosaurs named Arnold and Sly still shake the earth...
Matura transforms the young man from Synge's scrawny and unlikely hero into a tall, well-built leading man, played with wide-eyed charm by the aptly named Victor Love. This makes his tale more plausible if less of a revolutionist's lesson in what Everyman might achieve. Gerald Gutierrez's cunningly coarse staging provides comic turns for most of the cast, notably Antonio Fargas as a rumshop owner and Michele Shay as a lustful voodoo practitioner...
...unsatisfying (and unprotected) sexual encounter. Suitably chastened, she seeks in an orgy of expiation to redeem herself by returning to the long-suffering Edward, who as further evidence of his perfection, takes her back. A rapturous reconciliation on his desk proves that faculty offices do have some charm...
...generally wants to maintain a certain distance from dysfunction; you don't want it leaping across the footlights to land, falsely grinning, falsely ingratiating, in your lap. But it is, of course, precisely the camera's business to facilitate such leaps. Even so, if these people had any real charm, if their oddity were cloaked in wit, if their rather chilly creator brought some real compassion to these sealed-off lives, we might take them more readily to heart. If they suggested some generalized insights about lower-middle-class life, we might more readily forgive their dreary excesses...
...harrowing anecdotes are told with apparent amusement that makes them all the scarier. The group leader recalls falling into the men's movement as a scam after a sexual-harassment case ended his college teaching career. Wendt depicts, with Normesque what-the-hey gestures and overstuffed teddy-bear charm, how he plunged far beyond his means to display machismo to fellow traders in the pit. These men clearly ought to be in search of something. But they can't see the forest or the trees...