Word: goldoni
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Libertine, blasphemer, aristocratic scapegrace, eternal anarchist, the Don Juan of legend still enthralls and disturbs the Western consciousness. He is a figure of mythic proportions, larger than the countless works of art that have tried to contain him, from Moliere and Goldoni through Byron and Shaw. The fascination of his enigmatic psychology is apparently inexhaustible. He has been seen as a Punch-like comic character; as a tragic hero, or Nietzschean rebel against God; as a walking textbook of sexual pathology. He survives all interpretations. He will survive even this one: an opulent but confused and wrongheaded adaptation...
Screenwriter Walter Newman, adapting Richard Price's tough novel, has no use for dramatic efficiency or synthesis. Besides Stony's story, he tells in lavish detail the histrionic tales of the hero's psychotic mother (Lelia Goldoni), his anorectic kid brother (Michael Hershewe), his sexually troubled dad (Tony Lo Bianco) and his defeated uncle (Paul Sorvino). Newman, like Price, wants to make a larger sociological point about the breakdown of oldtime immigrant values in chaotic modern America, but he overstates the case. Bloodbrothers has so much narrative, most of it melodramatic, that every scene becomes a climax...
...screeching pitch. He matches the script's verbal and physical violence blow for blow with slam-bang editing and ; pounding musical score; he never give the audience a chance to catch its breath. What is intended to be operatic come out overblown and, at times, overacted Goldoni's Mom is so crazed she seems to have stepped out of Exorcist...