Word: horman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...personalized portraits of his characters and highly-polished production Yet while the State Department has issued a formal statement condemning the premise behind the movie, no one has yet tried to challenge it in court. The story is based upon the disappearance of a young American writer. Charlie Horman '64, who was living in Chile when the Allende government was over-thrown in 1973 Immediately following the revolution, Horman's father (Jack Lemmon '47) travels to Chile and, with Sissy Spacek, who plays Charlie Horman's wife, searches for his missing...
...intertwining themes in the movie center around the search for Charlie Horman and the relationship between the stuffy, Christian Scientists Lemmon, and the freewheeling, impertinent Spacek. A devout, almost chauvinistic patriot when he first comes to Chile, spouting idioms attesting to the greatness of the American Way, Lemmon slowly hardens to the cold reality of the American Way abroad, as he learns that the U.S. government may have been responsible for not only the revolution itself, but for his own son's death as well...
...THIS idea that our own government may have authorized the death of Charlie Horman that gnaws at us as an American audience, that we cannot believe. The indiscriminate torturing and killing of hundreds of Chilean civilians in the movie repulses us, but somehow we remain outside, protected from the terror and pain But the killing of an American truly outrages us. What happened to that invisible forcefield of protection that is supposed to surround an American everywhere he goes? Lemmon wonders. And we wonder, too Yet it is only through the death of the young American that our repulsion grows...
...WHILE COSTA GAVRAS condemns the U.S. government for its role in the Chilean revolution he refuses to place the blame solely on the shoulders of the government officials Toward the end of the movie, when it becomes increasingly apparent that Charlie Horman has been shot, Gavras gives these slippery bureaucratic types we have grown to hate their say The U S ambassador to Chile explains to Lemmon that whatever the American government has done in Chile "has been done to protect the American way of life at home" Another official chimes in "and a very good way of life...
...approaching proof, however, and the State Department is outraged by the film's thesis. It has taken the film seriously enough to issue an unusual three-page statement disputing I its major points. After an eight-year investigation, it said, "no light was shed upon the circumstances of [Horman's] death and little upon the circumstances of his disappearance...