Word: haggard
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There are more mundane reasons First Wives is a hit. It has three stars playing to their strengths: Midler the canny yenta, Keaton mining lodes of pruney anguish, Hawn a glorious hoot encased in her collagenized lips and sprawling ego. And before the film gets haggard in Act III, it's pretty darn funny, thanks to director Hugh Wilson (who wove a camaraderie of losers in his TV show WKRP in Cincinnati), screenwriter Robert Harling (Steel Magnolias) and rewriter Paul Rudnick (The Addams Family...
...shop window; Spacey's prosecutor Buckley brandishing a bulky gun to make a point; or Samuel L. Jackson's face at any of his many stages of pop-eyed rage. Other touches involve the bathing of a Klan member tete-a-tete in ethereal light or Jake's haggard face in the lined shade of half-open blinds...
...scenario has its soft spots, but it does allow Stone to adopt a white-trash Southern cadence and wear a persuasive dust-bowl scowl. In stir she sits and stares, her old sexual insolence tamped into sadness and contempt. She looks haggard, wiry, prickly--fabulous. By the end she is practically Garbo in Camille, the doomed woman comforting the gentle, lesser man who loves her. Stone does a fine job without surrendering her star quality. She just can't save this schematic story...
...paintings, "Prisoners from the Front," shows how this documentary style can be used to great effect. The painting shows three captured Confederate soldiers being displayed to a Union corporal (who has been identified as an alumnus of Harvard). Homer shows that every segment of the American people--old and haggard, young and immature, southern gentleman and rednecks, could be found in the armies; he emphasizes that the War was a universal experience. At the same time, Union and Confederate troops face each other with obvious respect and compassion...
...that didn't seem to matter. Newsweek wanted an exhausted looking Rudenstine and appeared willing to do whatever was necessary to get it. The photo which the magazine ultimately chose to run on its cover is obviously a closely cropped blow-up seemed intended to make Rudenstine appear as haggard as possible. The deceptiveness of this photograph is apparent when compared with other photos of Rudenstine taken that same night...