Word: hamlet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...messy story-telling and poor characterization in the film are aptly capped off by the worst instrumental soundtrack since Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. One would expect at least a few traditional Irish folk songs, or instrumentals of a somewhat Irish tone; unfortunately, all we get is sweeping orchestral muck more suited for a huge epic than the simple story of one poor Irish family. Not surprising, considering the fact that John Williams, of Star Wars fame, was in charge of the score. Limerick is no Tatooine...
Seventy miles west of Cambridge, deep in a hardwood forest near the Massachusetts hamlet of Petersham, there is a Harvard classroom without walls, and four Harvard students who may set foot in Harvard Yard for the first time at Commencement...
...Crowe's Wigand is undoubtedly the body and soul of the film; Crowe plays Wigand like a modern Hamlet, a quiet, broken shell of a man, and endows him with incredible dignity and grace. In this quietly riveting performance, Crowe captures every nuance of his character's dilemma and slow collapse; he heartbreakingly portrays Wigand's paranoia, depression and bewilderment...
Rimmed by steep ridges and mountain shanties, the hamlet of Keystone, W. Va. (pop. 627), looks like a movie set left over from Coal Miner's Daughter. Main Street, all four blocks of it, has not a single traffic light. Yet the local bank in recent years has boasted one of the highest profit margins in the U.S., and reached $1 billion in assets in 1998. You might wonder how such a bank could thrive in one of the poorest counties in the U.S. And you'd be in good company, because bank examiners and the FBI wondered...
...hero here is Jeffrey Wigand. As played so acutely by Russell Crowe, he is a sullen, stocky, difficult fellow, a Hamlet whose soliloquies have to be read in his nervous blinks and stammers, in the latticework under his tired, wary eyes. They are all the hints we need to detect a soul swamped in ethical dilemmas. When Crowe gets to command the screen, The Insider comes to roiled life. It's an All the President's Men in which Deep Throat takes center stage, an insider prodded to spill the truth...