Word: gresham
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...much of A Dangerous Woman and Shadowlands, Winger plays against her comely strengths. She almost shields her eyes -- she knows they can too easily seduce the camera -- and she makes the audience struggle to like her characters. Her Joy Gresham, dressed dowdily and flaunting a broad Noo Yawk accent, seems at first punished into caricature. Martha in A Dangerous Woman trudges through town as an ostentatious object of pity. The actress won't do all the work; viewers must meet her halfway. With a Winger woman, it's always worth the effort. Joy grows subtly to human size...
Winger is unlikely to change, now that she is a full-time mother with a revived career -- earning critical kudos for her role as poet Joy Gresham in Shadowlands and a Golden Globe nomination for the aptly named A Dangerous Woman. "I really don't care," Winger sighs, in her champagne-and-cigarettes voice, when the subject of her reputation is broached. "I'd rather have the freedom to say what I want. Sometimes I wish I were more graceful, but, hey, I'm not -- though I'm working on it. And frankly, I'm more interested in people...
Fortunately, Richard Attenborough came to the same conclusion. In casting Shadowlands, the director was looking for "an actress who in her own personality had some of the feisty, slightly abrasive elements of Joy Gresham. I knew of Debra's 'difficult' reputation -- of being quite a girl, as we say at home. So I said, 'I don't mind if you slap me around the head -- if at the end of the day what appears on the screen is what we all want.' And of course what happened was that she absolutely came up with the goods...
...tweed. This must be England-in fact, Oxford of 1951. We are visiting with the charming, boyish at heart, but painfully inhibited C.S. Lewis (Anthony Hopkins), author of the Narnia chronicles for children and a well-known theologian. "Shadowlands" is the story of his encounter with the lovely Joy Gresham (Debra Winger), who Lewis at first dismissively descibes as a "Jewish Communist poet from New York...
...cries. This moving scene involves Lewis letting down his old boy guard to share a wrenching yet tender moment with Joy's son, Douglas (Joseph Mazzello). Hopkins delights as the naive and slightly ingenuous children's author. But Winger seems to do more of the work. And as Joy Gresham she has her work cut out for her. Her character is almost as stereotypical as Lewis' initial analysis makes her sound. She's brash, loud-mouthed, has feminist and other leftist leanings and simply will never be anything but a Yankee. Lewis and his muddled, ex-military brother (an endearing...