Word: denouement
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...fathers have ever set out so deliberately to found a political dynasty-although the Kennedys were too close together to be called dynastic. The denouement of his dream was especially bitter for a man whose tough pride in name and faith in success amounted almost to hubris. For most of the decade of his sons' triumphs, he was paralyzed and speechless following a stroke the year after Jack's inauguration...
Perhaps the denouement of the novel is the only way it could end. After the cop's assassination, all three main characters gradually slip off center stage to return to the orbit of their private lives as events move forward at their own dizzying momentum. At the end of the novel, Browning is just what he was before: a middle class black college professor, still essentially moderate but a little wiser...
...Dyan Cannon), after being let in on the news, are initially puzzled, then attracted by this easy permissiveness until, at film's end, the two couples wind up in bed together at a Las Vegas hotel. There they seem to come to their middle-class senses in a denouement that is the biggest cop-out since Sidney Poitier appeared as the world's whitest black man in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Mazursky's direction is impersonal and, at best, functional; his idea of good cinematography is getting everyone in focus and lighting the scene...
...with ridicule. Another job as a handyman on a reptile farm falls through when Kilgannon becomes so frightened of losing Natalie that he starts to let the animals out of their cages. He even interrupts Natalie's assignation with a Nebraska motorcycle cop (Robert Duvall), provoking an improbable denouement that obviously wanted to say something about violence in America but winds up merely as death by cinematic accident...
...real!" Still, Wexler's dramatic attempts to reconcile personal and public crises lead him occasionally to overload his film. The romance never quite has the passion and urgency that it should, and the novice director's infatuation with Jean-Luc Godard deceives him into a gratuitous existential denouement (straight out of Contempt) in which the lovers hear about their involvement in a fatal car crash before it actually occurs. Wexler's sympathies are admittedly with the brutalized young, and he sets out to show the police as almost total villains. In that, he had plenty of help...