Word: derning
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...wake up one morning and realize that you're about to turn 40. What do you do? In Middle Age Crazy Bruce Dern attempts to bury his anxiety pangs by buying a Porsche and having a one-nighter with a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. Dern recovers his senses and goes home for an alcoholic reconciliation with Wife Ann-Margret in a 105° hot tub. That husband and wife keep their clothes on in the tub is understandable; they're probably worried about an R rating. But don't they know that too much booze...
...Dern has his detractors--people who think he perpetually overacts. He might, but that's what makes him so interesting. Most comfortable in "psycho" roles, Dern's bulging eyes and thin, strangled voice convey inner torment and rage better than any film star today. He frequently suggest a cross between Anthony Perkins and Jack Nicholson--a homey, sardonic, seventies Norman Bates--and those quivering depths make his comparatively restrained performances in The Great Gatsby and Smile teeter devastatingly on the brink of an explosion. But in his all-out roles--in Silent Running, Black Sunday, Coming Home-- Dern makes...
...TRAGEDY, according to Yellen, is that Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson, two brilliant writers and decent, caring human beings, were unable to know each other, to love each other. He attempts to explain Lewis' problem in the final scene, where Dern, who has gotten drunk and become violent, sits strapped in a straitjacket and launches into a lengthy monologue as Lewis's father, revealing the old man's perpetual dissatisfaction with his son. The speech should be a tour-de-force--Dern does a beautiful job with it--but it is so empty in concept, so obvious in construction, that...
...DERN BEGINS merrily but uninterestingly, engaging in Yellen's witless but stubbornly persistent banter. He gets to be boyish and lewd and folksy, to plead and be charmingly self-deprecating, to do lots of nightclub imitations (accents were Lewis's specialty), to get drunk and be irrepressibly untactful, exposing the hypocrisy of others, to despair and age and writhe in agony. Dern does well, especially considering he's been off stage for 19 years, but the quality that makes him special, that sometimes seems too intense for the big screen, is imperceptible on stage. You'd think that his body...
...takes considerable artistic and economic courage for an established film actor to return to the stage--even in a "safe," commercial play like Strangers. But Dern has worried enough about being typecast to take that risk. Perhaps his publicly expressed feeling that there are similarities in background, education and personality between himself and Sinclair Lewis led him to overestimate Strangers, to judge it a far more significant play than it is. But Strangers does not serve the "daring" that we associate with even his most typical film performances, and perhaps no play in the commercial theater can. Film stars have...