Word: flaws
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Harvey Swados finished Celebration shortly before dying of a brain hemorrhage three years ago at the age of 52. The novel has the virtues one cherished in Swados' fiction: decency, compassion and a gentle wit. Yet the book suffers from what was always Swados' noble flaw as a novelist: a talent never quite up to the demands he put upon...
Throughout, Hearts and Minds displays more than enough heart. It is mind that is missing. Perhaps the deepest flaw lies in the method: the Viet Nam War is too convoluted, too devious to be examined in a style of compilation without comment. And righteous indignation may tend to blind the documentary film maker to his prime task: the representation of life in all its fullness, not only those incidents that conform to his thesis. Peter Davis is the talented creator of much-prized TV documentaries (Hunger in America, The Selling of the Pentagon). But these were simpler projects...
This suggests a chief flaw in the movie, the lack of serious characters, besides Nick, on whom Mabel's madness can be registered. Both mothers-in-law are one-dimensional, and I'm not sure it's in the nature of mothers-in-law to be to. Eddie Shaw is unbelievably silly as the Jewish doctor who tries to intercode between Mabel and Nick. Mabel's father appears at the dinner to welcome his daughter back from the anylum and we find that her obsession with the children is supplemented by a heavy attachment to him--but the idea...
Under Anderson's direction, the movie gathers enormous force, partly from the raw skill of its actors, partly from the accumulating tension of frustration. Anderson has tried to turn the play's deepest flaw to its own advantage. In Celebration has power from energy that is never released. Anderson's skill cannot make the play any more complete or successful, but it does make it happen superbly well...
...result, there is a currently fashionable speculation in Washington and elsewhere that might be called the Mr. X theory. It holds that either in the primaries or at a deadlocked convention a new candidate, Mr. X, will sweep the exhausted and disarrayed Democrats off their feet. The one major flaw in the theory is that no one has yet come up with a plausible name. Some Democrats believe that Senator Edward Kennedy might be persuaded to accept a draft; others keep hoping for Senators Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey or even McGovern; still others yearn for a genuinely fresh face...