Word: garp
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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BORN. To Valerie Velardi, 31, ballet dancer, and her husband of five years, Robin Williams, 30, hyperkinetic comic actor (Popeye, The World According to Garp and TV's Mork and Mindy): their first child, a son; in San Francisco. Name: Zachary. Weight...
...somber backdrop of the movie. He maintains an ironic edge throughout, towards both the world and himself. This makes his portrayal of pathos both palatable and convincing. While Mary Beth Hurt's role does not allow for the scope or development of her performance in The World According to Garp, her Laura is likeable, a modern version of the waif. The visual effects are understated and well-controlled; the scenery--running the gamut from dingy grey rooms to dingy grey hospital corridors--parallels the predominant emotional tones of the piece. The most surprising thing, however, is that Chilly Scenes...
...world according to Novelist John Irving is a dangerous place, the individual's position in it much more fragile than he imagines it to be. For the characters in The World According to Garp, the problem is that ironies both bitter and brutal keep gusting up out of nowhere and knocking them down. Out of this basic and by no means original insight, Irving crafted a bestseller and something more. His hero, T.S. Garp, that wise and foolish, gentle and fierce writer-wrestler has become a sort of postmodernist Everyman, and his often deadly adventures on the bleak...
Robin Williams' Garp is strictly from Ork; he appears to be visiting his role rather than inhabiting it. Even John Lithgow, who plays Roberta Muldoon, the transsexualized onetime tight end, fails to give his usual gifted portrayal of an eccentric. Only Glenn Close, as Carp's mother, a feminist heroine, escapes from the bland rhythms of the film to cut a few strongly individualized capers...
...book, one of Garp's sons mistakes a warning about an undertow where he goes swimming and comes to believe that a giant frog, an "undertoad," menaces him. It becomes a symbol for all the hidden dangers of modern life. The film never locates its undertoad and thus never confronts the true subject of the book. It is all just body surfing on a placid pond. -By Richard Schickel