Word: dwarf
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Rubin shows considerable talent. Even so, the author wisely does not try to capture the war in its dreadful magnitudes of size and duration. He ambushes a piece of it from a Montagnard village in the central Vietnamese highlands, circa 1964, just before the machinery of destruction began to dwarf its human masters...
...17th century Italy. Their improvisations were passionate and bawdy, but so charming that even Church-supported French nobility were seduced into laughter. Impresario Flaminio Scala concocted such a dynamic group by painstakingly typecasting each member perfectly. So all they needed to do--Armanda the grotesque but sharp-witted dwarf, Pantalone the cross miserly Jew, Dottore the pompous doctor of quackery, Brighella the spiteful gadfly, and the others--was get up on stage and play themselves to the hilt...
...these intuitive and somewhat pat perceptions, nagging self-doubts dangle at the end of each memoir. But instead of developing their restive psyches, Prose disappointingly cuts the players short. Armanda the dwarf, for example, acknowledges the tension that arises from Flaminio's perfect typecasting, from his refusal to recognize her private soul. But the plot does not allow time for her to develop potential feelings of self-worth that can replace an identity culled from the glory of the stage. Instead, her memoir trails off in confusion, with a lame admission to Flamino that "I myself was never quite sure...
...eventually utopia will only come when human nature has been transformed." Then he'd raise his arms and voice in a clarion call to the unsaved to come forward and accept Christ. He had confronted them with problems of human relations, of social inequality, of government corruption--problems that dwarf men into insignificance and inadequacy. And then he had given them...
...peasants - but when finally confronted by the forces of good, they appear as pitiful, helpless creatures. That sort of facile switch does little for credibility, less for coherence, and leaves the film's heavy freight of symbols (including a bevy of slaughtered animals and the ever popular humpbacked dwarf) lying about like so much unclaimed baggage...