Word: dreaming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Jesse Jackson's speech at the Democratic National Convention before entrepreneurs began to profit from his stirring words. MPI Home Video of Oak Forest, Ill., bought film footage of the address from a subsidiary of ABC-TV and produced a 60-minute home video titled Jesse Jackson: We Can Dream Again. The $14.95 tape was an instant success, pulling in 31,000 mail and telephone orders from around...
Imagine Clark Gable anchoring one of Frank Capra's psychodrama parables of Americana and you get a hint of Jeff Bridges' performance in Tucker: The Man and His Dream. The roguish, can-do smile looks welded on. No boardroom backstabbing, no political malfeasance can wipe that salesman's grin off his face. It is the smile of a cockeyed optimist whose tragic flaw is that he refuses to believe anything can go wrong. And it is attached to a mind racing with ideas and a mouth that motors even faster. Bridges' Preston Tucker is a man in perpetual motion -- gesticulating...
...depict Tucker's life with his family and its extension, his closest co- workers (Martin Landau is particularly good as his shadowy chief financial officer), Coppola uses the tones of an old Saturday Evening Post illustration, all lamplit glow. Tucker's public life, promoting his dream, looks like an ad from the same magazine, hard-edged, overly bright. But when he confronts the automotive traditionalists in his own organization or the politicians whom the movie shows endlessly harassing him at Detroit's behest, and when, finally, he ; is placed on trial for fraud, the film turns paranoid in the manner...
...script is rich in ambiguous allusions to the sustaining myths of old-fashioned popular fiction and the folklore of capitalism. It neither blandly accepts them nor blithely satirizes them. Bridges' portrayal of Tucker is in the same key. In the largest sense, he is fully, honestly committed to his dream. But there are lovely little moments when we feel his love of hype and con for their own sake, and sense that whatever the outcome of his enterprise, he knows he has already lifted himself to legendary status...
...cast gets a similar opportunity to assert any complexity; Joan Allen as Tucker's wife Vera particularly suffers in this regard. But that is a small defect in a movie of large virtue. Preston Tucker failed to attain what we are pleased to think of as the American Dream of success: his factory produced only a few dozen cars before it closed. But there is another more common, more potent American Dream, which involves not the invention of products but the invention of self. And this movie, genial and fierce, is proof of Tucker's success in that more basic...