Word: gambon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...compressed; it needs TV's room to digress. And the director, Keith Gordon, doesn't really recapture '50s Los Angeles, where Potter reset his flashbacks. They feel perfunctory (and underbudgeted). Finally, Robert Downey Jr., who works hard as Dark, just doesn't have the weight, age and rage Michael Gambon brought to the role...
...that most unfashionable creature, a western--the story of two cowboys, Charley (Costner) and Boss (Robert Duvall) in 1882, caring for their herd and each other, wandering into town and into trouble. It is peopled with the usual suspects: the corrupt sheriff (James Russo), the mean rich guy (Michael Gambon), the warm, weathered spinster (Annette Bening). The plot is basically a real-estate wrangle: whether Boss and Charley have the right to graze their herd on land claimed by the rich guy. And there's a lovely interlude with Charley and the spinster, where the cowboy has to recall gentlemanly...
...Start with that first number: two. Two actors, but four characters: a man in his early 60s, Salter (Gambon), and three of his sons (all played by Daniel Craig). We are in the near future - say, the middle of this century. Thirty-some years before, Salter's wife had died and he was left to raise his four-year-old son Bernard, who had begun life as an angel ("You were the most beautiful baby everyone said"). But the father was neglectful, sometimes brutal to the boy; Bernard grew wild, sick. In anger and cunning, Salter took advantage...
...Gambon has played some monsters in his day - the gross thief in "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover," the tobacco company boss in "The Insider," the man everyone is dying to kill in "Gosford Park" - as well as the raging, pustulent fantast in Dennis Potter's miniseries "The Singing Detective." He can get at the agony of infamy as well as anyone, and does so here, though director Stephen Daldry ("Billy Elliott") has given him too many props; Gambon breaks the four-century theatrical record for the most cigarettes smoked ostentatiously in a single evening. Craig finds subtle...
...flat-liners. There are exceptions, of course. Smith is both noisily and funnily imperious as an eccentric, impoverished dowager; Northam invests a real character, music-hall star Ivor Novello, with a wry and wistful intelligence; and Fry's self-important detective, cluelessly investigating the murder of their host (Gambon), is also funny. Altman wants us to sympathize with the servants, and it turns out that the crime is justified by a back story of Dickensian sentimentality, but tedium overwhelms caring well before this endless film finally concludes...