Word: hauteur
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...Almasy finds his ideal desert woman and follows her to hell. He then lives, just barely, to tell the tale to a ministering angel (Juliette Binoche) who can give him what he needs: not absolution but understanding. The lovers are Ralph Fiennes--all coiled sexiness, threat shrouded in hauteur--and Kristin Scott Thomas, who has the gift of making intelligence erotic; they come together in a dance of doom that is abrasive, mysterious, powerful, inevitable. Anthony Minghella's beautiful film, based on the Michael Ondaatje novel, gets the rapture right, with a scope and intimacy rarely seen on film since...
...film is, in an old phrase, beyond gorgeous: a feast whose splendor serves Almasy complex passions. The cast is superb: Binoche, with her thin, seraphic smile; Scott Thomas, aware of the spell she casts but not flaunting it; Fiennes, especially, radiating sexy mystery, threat shrouded in hauteur. Doom and drive rarely have so much stately star quality...
...along for the ride. Carole Lombard traded quips and punches with her co-stars. Rosalind Russell ran giant corporations from her perch as executive secretary to some very soft plutocrats. Katharine Hepburn, a cool goddess, came to earth to cuddle with Spencer Tracy. Bette Davis strutted her sensationally neurotic hauteur. Joan Crawford played the unapologetic gold digger, which is how she leveled half a dozen other star actresses in The Women. These actresses played characters who didn't need to take revenge. They had sexual equality, emotional superiority...
...brutal cold of Montana, just 40 miles from the border. Yet the series does not ignore complexities (the inter-tribal hatreds, for example), and the matter-of-fact tone of its Native American spokespeople (particularly the mellifluous novelist N. Scott Momaday) is largely free of sentimentality and moral hauteur...
...gives this all a bit more focus by making sure the early events, including the rhinoceros, resonate throughout the film. He also gives James (winningly played by Paul Terry) a mission: to find his dream city, a Deco-delicious Manhattan. Spider (voiced by Susan Sarandon) here has the melancholy hauteur of a Garbo femme fatale; and the Centipede, obnoxious in the book, is now a Leo Gorcey type (voiced by Richard Dreyfuss), who gets a shot at redemption by fighting a shipful of skeleton pirates straight out of Ray Harryhausen's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad...