Word: eleni
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...bestseller Eleni, Gage reported the results of his researches as well as set down his own recollections of what it was like to live in Greece during both World War II and the Greek Civil War. The result was characterized by a judicious mix of soft-soap elegizing about Gage's happy life with his mother and sisters before Greece's Civil War and hard-core indictments of the men who shattered their peaceful idyll...
Adapting the volume for the big screen, Gage has sacrificed much of the undercover reportage that made Eleni such a good read. He relies instead on a top-heavy selection of sentimental flashbacks featuring Eleni selflessly ministering to the needs of her children, sanctifying her as the archtypical Grecian mother-martyr. In so doing, Gage forgoes the realistic context essential to the docu-drama style he is ostensibly seeking (and had achieved in the book), ending up instead with a tear-soaked, superficial Monday Night at the Movies...
...title role, Kate Nelligan unfortunately does nothing to diminish Gage's beatific image of Eleni. Shot through a bright yellow screen, Nelligan positively glows with the radiance of the blessed. In one scene, she has to lug a huge trunk full of rare American goodies up the hill next to her house, drawing a clear analogy between the soon-to-be betrayed Eleni and the martyred Christ making his ascent up Calgary Hill. As she reaches the top, she announces to Nicholas, God and anyone else within hearing, "Nicolai Gatzuiannus, your father is alive!" with all the verbal presence...
...picture Nelligan as Gage's angelic mother, imagine Sally Field as the widowed farm wife in Places in the Heart. But unlike Field, whose film character admittedly has a much less turbulent life story than does Eleni, Nelligan is unable to bring her character to life with remotely human inflections or gestures...
Take, for example, her contribution to the film's most heart-wrenching scene, that of Eleni's execution. Silhouetted against the jagged cliffs of rural Greece, Nelligan as Eleni stands erect in front of a makeshift firing line. In sharp contrast to her fellow "criminals" she looks her murderers directly in the eye. As the riflists take aim, she throws her arms up in a gesture of defiance, glances heavenwards, and shrieks "My childrr...