Word: hoffa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...question, right up there with who shot J.R., what's in Al Capone's vault, and where's Jimmy Hoffa...
...Heart). But she has learned little from any of them about building comedy or character. Though this off-Broadway production, handsomely designed by Loren Sherman, boasts two movie-marquee names -- bossy Marcia Gay Harden, frazzled Julie Hagerty -- it is Frank Whaley (the kid at the diner in Hoffa) who carries the burden of the play and almost makes it soar. He masks an artist's passion in beguiling nonchalance...
CRITICS GROUSE ABOUT HOLLYWOOD'S LOVE OF THE tried and true, but ultimately that's just what the audience wants. Proof: this holiday season's movie- attendance figures. The big disappointments were all thematically adventurous: Leap of Faith (Steve Martin as an evangelist), Hoffa (Jack Nicholson as a labor leader), Malcolm X (Denzel Washington as a civil rights activist) and Toys (Robin Williams as . . . whatever...
...Hence Hoffa, an utterly externalized view of the corrupt, crusading boss of the Teamsters, James R. Hoffa. The R stood for Riddle, and David Mamet's lean script is content to leave him at that. Hoffa does stuff -- bullies management, connives with the Mob -- but who is he? The movie gives not a clue. Jack Nicholson looks eerily like his subject, and he has the abrupt gestures and staccato voice of a man who overcomes lack of eloquence by force of will. But director Danny DeVito, who also plays Hoffa's closest ally, gets way too fond...
...posits a conflict for control of a family toy company between a near holy fool (Robin Williams) and his uncle, a retired Army general (Michael Gambon) who wants to convert the plant to military-weapons production. Both are predictable types. Their employees are so sweetly innocent one longs for Hoffa's Teamsters to come in and give them mean lessons. But everyone's main function is to trigger special effects and lend scale to production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti's overweening sets, which sometimes quote wittily from the modernist tradition (Dada, etc.) but also overuse the pachyderm motif at the heavy...