Word: derning
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...KING OF MARVIN GARDENS. Bruce Dern and Jack Nicholson are superb in Bob Rafelson's tenaciously fascinating rendering of the dead end of the American dream...
Jason (Bruce Dern) lives like some sleazy sultan, complete with a harem consisting of an aging, manic coquette (Ellen Burstyn) and her empty-eyed stepdaughter (Julie Anne Robinson). He is a wheeler-dealer in shopworn dreams, an anxious scam artist with a line of patter that makes him sound like one of Eugene O'Neill's drummers. David, ever skeptical, eventually lets himself be suckered in, more to demonstrate a kind of desperate solidarity with his brother than anything else. The scheme is an old Staebler fantasy: take over an island called Tiki in the Hawaiian archipelago, build...
...writer and director are often guilty of using the same kind of tin-ear dialogue and trite image that David himself might employ in one of his tortuous monologues. One of Rafelson's most certain talents is a nearly preternatural instinct for working with actors, and Nicholson and Dern give consummate performances. In such diverse parts as the bemused attorney in Easy Rider, the laborer and fugitive musician in Five Easy Pieces, the tomcat of Carnal Knowledge, Nicholson has already displayed remarkable range. David, so thoroughly introverted, so tentative, is the most demanding role...
...nearly a decade, Dern has been playing featured parts in everything from The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant to The Cowboys, and this kind of apprenticeship has taught him how to turn a scene with a shrug or an inflection. Now, with the rich role of Jason, Dern's talents can really unfold. He has an almost combustible uncertainty that shades Jason's assurance with doubt and intimations of defeat. Dern also moves Jason beyond the more obvious pyrotechnics to which the script has confined him, and the scene in which he embraces an embarrassed Nicholson...
Ultimately The Cowboys suggests that you are not a man until you have murdered. These children dispatch Dern in an act of outright sadism all the more chilling for its apparent dispassion. Yet Rydell and the screenwriters seem to be congratulating them on their new-found machismo. The Cowboys is no investigation of the inherent evil of the young, like Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica. Nor does it have the awful irony of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (TIME, Dec. 20), in which heroism turned into savagery. Here savagery is seen as heroism...