Word: daughter
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...outsider, Anne appears perfectly normal. She is impeccably dressed, her white hair is immaculate, and she wears a corsage of pink baby roses on her lapel. She engages in conversation, cracks jokes and seems thrilled to be surrounded by so many loved ones. But talk to her daughter Barbara Reiter, and it's clear that Anne isn't normal at all. She insists that she didn't know about the party, even though, Barbara says, "I told her about it every day for at least a week." Barbara got her mother dressed that morning and took her to the beauty...
...next day her lover is cruelly murdered, and her elder daughter Lilly (Evan Rachel Wood) is abducted by a renegade Indian band intent on selling Lilly and some other young women into sexual slavery in Mexico. The local sheriff won't help Maggie, and the Army is looking in all the wrong places. Only Jones, wise in the ways of the Indians and adept at tracking in the trackless wilderness, can help her and her spunky younger child Dot (Jenna Boyd) recover Lilly before it's too late...
...acting too helps ground the film in a reality that somehow makes the mystic shenanigans believable. Jones, the actor, has never been more wry, sly and taciturn. He won't yield to his pain--to the memory of past mistakes, the implacable fury of the daughter he deserted--yet you feel it in his every movement. As for Blanchett, she's simply wonderful. She has played her share of queenly figures, but her acting essence is, emotionally speaking, plain-Jane. She's a straight shooter, with an uncanny ability to find a character's spine and communicate it without fuss...
Even as she is drawn into Chubb's beguilements, Wode-Douglass is a brittle, amusing narrator. But eventually she's just the audience for Chubb's less gripping story of his daughter's kidnapping by McCorkle, the figment with a beating heart. With this, the book seems to move from novel to fable, a world in which poems and children all have uncertain parentage. Even so, decoding that fable is another kind of pleasure. Carey's book begins with a quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Here's a story with another monster who strode into the world...
...fact that Maggie's skill with folk medicine analogizes her father's magical skills hints from the outset that she's more his daughter than she cares to acknowledge. But their journey to a guessable, fateful ending turns out to be richer, more surprising than we might imagine. This is one of those genre pieces that take more interesting chances than they want to (openly) admit. --By Richard Schickel