Word: hortons
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Welcome to regional-theater cinema, where locale is a crucial character, the pace is measured in eye drops, and everyone on both sides of the camera aspires to the ordinary. As playwright (The Trip to Bountiful) and screenwriter (Tender Mercies), Horton Foote has backpacked over this terrain for two generations. On Valentine's Day, the prequel (though not the equal) of last year's 1918, marks one more stroll through Foote's family plot. Again we find the Vaughn and Robedaux families forcing smiles and small talk as the Great War rages 5,000 miles from their southeastern Texas town...
...mood is so lulling that the intrusion of climactic plot devices involving an alcoholic friend and a cooty cousin seems not only extraneous but downright rude. There goes the neighborhood, and the movie. Instead of a valentine to his ghosts, Foote finally delivers a tardy, clumsy Easter present: Horton Hatches an Egg. By Richard Corliss...
Most of the passion attending 1918 was spent in getting the story on film. This is a family movie in every sense of the term. The writer is Horton Foote (Tender Mercies), who based his script on incidents in his parents' lives in Wharton, Texas. Foote's wife was one of the film's producers; his son worked as an actor, casting director and production assistant; the bed in which Horace ails belonged to Foote's parents; the baby born at film's end is most likely the author. And the leading lady is Foote's daughter Hallie. A vanity...
...complaint on returning from the supermarket: "Why are modern groceries so heavy?" (from Lee Blessing's Independence, a mother-and-daughters drama that plays like Crimes of the Heart without Henley's savory moonshine kick). Often in these works, nothing happens; usually, that is the point. In Horton Foote's Courtship virtually all of the "action," except for one chaste kiss, occurs offstage and is relayed to the audience as a Texas family's gossip. The play's teen-age sisters might be called Rosie and Gilda; they are as irrelevant to their small town...
Tender Mercies. A country singer touches bottom and finds that it consists of good Texas earth in which he can reroot his humanity. Actor Robert Duvall warms and graces Screenwriter Horton Foote's tale with his lived-in face and a performance as raw as a Hank Williams ballad...