Word: goneril
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...Jason Robards, has been renamed Larry and dressed in coveralls, or that he decides to divide his realm among his daughters for tax purposes, although these devices have a certain flattening effect on the tale. The problem is that it is no longer his tragedy but his children's--Goneril, who is here renamed Ginny and played by Jessica Lange; and Regan, who's called Rose and impersonated by Michelle Pfeiffer; and Cordelia, known now as Caroline and acted by Jennifer Jason Leigh...
...well. At one time the presidency was like King Lear (great stakes, global importances, thunder, cosmic forces contending). But Lear left the stage at the end of the cold war. The old white male patriarchy has gone to the dog track. We live in the squabbling-siblings era of Goneril and Regan (cut the defense budget, the old man doesn't need that many knights anyway). Bob Dole is merely the Duke of Kent, forlornly running on the Lear Restoration ticket...
...exact and exhilarating sense of place, a sheer Americanness that gives it its own soul and roots. More important, Ginny and Rose are not villains. Smiley has had Lear at the back of her mind since she first read the play. "I never bought the conventional interpretation that Goneril and Regan were completely evil," she says. "Unconsciously at first, I had reservations: this is not the whole story...
...film the daughters are sons, and one of them tells the old man that his children are what he made them. Smiley began reading commentaries about the play, especially by feminists, and was miffed to find that even the most radical rejected Shakespeare's terrible twosome: "A remark condemning Goneril and Regan was de rigueur...
...playing Goneril and Regan, and who Cordelia? Could this be one of those Orient Express situations in which everyone is the murderer? Everyone has a motive; no question about that. Malcolm goads his whining brood without mercy, taking care to be seen splashing money and champagne in all directions but theirs as he buys racehorses and lolls about the world like a pasha...