Word: elephantic
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Director Lynch--whose only previous film is the weird and silly Eraserhead--handles Elephant Man with rare tact and delicacy. He paces his film deliberately, creating a cautious, mild-mannered atmosphere that keeps it from becoming a ridiculous creature feature or a two-hour sermon on life's injustice. He...
Lynch's deliberate technique works most effectively in the way he familiarizes the audience with the Elephant Man's deformities. Merrick is seen little by little, first in silhouette, then behind a screen, later in a quick, startling flash. When the camera finally focuses on the young man's face...
YET, ANTHONY HOPKINS' superb performance as Treves carries the film. The epitome of Victorian respectability, Treves is a relentlessly serious man--he smiles no more than twice in the course of the film. Treves desperately clings to an ideal of social conscientiousness and obligation in the midst of the dehumanizing...
The script by Lynch, Christopher Devore, and Eric Bergen is earnest and intelligent, though it suffers frequently from the unavoidable heavy-handedness that accompanies the theme of man's inhumanity to man. The scenes with Merrick and various excessively slimy and sinister persecutors flirt with melodrama. Rather than concentrating their...
Like Frankenstein's creation and Quasimodo, or any monster worth his salt, Merrick is doomed. But there are no rampaging townspeople screaming for the creature's blood, no corny "'Twas beauty killed the beast" tag line. Elephant Man ends in sadness, but also on a peculiar, vaguely cathartic note. Lynch...