Word: cynic
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...lame. Peckinpah and Wurlitzer are on much surer ground dealing with the dubious morality of Garrett's decision to hunt Billy. Garrett, unlike Peckinpah's other protagonists in High Country and The Wild Bunch, is no hero. As played-superbly -by Coburn, he is a dead-eyed cynic, a man who can slither neatly from one moral position to another. "It's just a way of staying alive," he says at one point. "Don't matter what side you're on. You're always right...
Lion (Al Pacino) is an innocent, and Max (Gene Hackman) a combative cynic of the open road. Like George and Lenny in Of Mice and Men−rather too much like them, in fact−Lion and Max fall in with each other while hitchhiking on a lonely country road. Max has spent six years in stir at San Quentin; Lion has been at sea in the merchant marine for five, fleeing the strangulating responsibilities of family and a 9-to-5 job. Lion is on his way to Detroit to see his wife and the child she was about...
...rather widely, yet convertly, bruited notion of awarding Mr. Nixon (or possibly his man Friday, the Herr Geheimrat Prof. Dr. Kissinger) the Nobel Peace Prize is preposterous enough that we can suspect it stems from the balmy brain of some unregenerate cynic, if not from some sycophant claquer of the Agnew stripe. Whoever thought it up fails to realize that so high an honor could have its seamy side, too. Mr. Nixon would find himself in a cheerless company along with men of thought, science, literature, above all, integrity, where plastic "sincerities" and windy rhetoric are not properly appreciated...
...THIS MATTERS LESS than you might expect, because David Wheeler, the director, doesn't stress Richard's melodramatic side, offering instead a sad, slight cynic whom Pacino makes astonishingly convincing until he loses interest towards the end. Pacino speaks measuredly and quietly, with sudden intervals of rage and continual flashes of humor, and when he talks of descanting on his own deformity or wonders at the blindness that finds him a marv'llous proper man, he means what he says. In even his blackest lies, we sense some sincerity, as though he has indeed determined to prove a villain reluetantly...
Perhaps the cynic has higher sights...