Word: idealist
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CATAPULTING HERSELF into the role of paranoid-schizophrenic idealist Susan Brock, Meryl Streep electrifies the screen in Fred Schepisi's otherwise disappointing Plenty. Adapted from the London stage play by David Hare, Plenty chronicles the disillusionment of a young English woman, played by Streep, who cannot come to grips with an imperfect world after actively serving in the French Resistance during World War II. Haunted by the fear that mankind has failed to "grow up" after the Holocaust, Susan sets out on a masochistic mission of self-destruction, punishing herself as a representative member of an unfeeling generation that needs...
Although Hare's psychological drama would have sat better with the '70s generation of "lost souls" out to find themselves, his premise of an idealist lost in the anti pastoral post-war haze of reconstruction is nonetheless an interesting one. It suffers, however, from Schepisi's overly artful direction and pacing. In an attempt to recreate the vanguard, new wave look of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, cinematographer Ian Baker arbitrarily splices the film every twenty minutes or so in order to mark the passage of time, eschewing the more conventional and smoother dissolving methods. The problem, of course, is that...
...Elmo's Fire is as unphotogenic as our big-toothed friend from Central Europe, it is also as charmingly seductive. The ever messed-up rich kid, the starry-eyed boys with love fixation, the political idealist turned proto-Yuppie: they are not Jungian archetypes or timeless characters of world literature, but they are, for some of us, too painfully familiar...
...surgeon forced to operate in a straitjacket. So drudgy Tom sets the play's pace and defeats the efforts of Herrmann to animate this stick--a challenge not usually above him, as he demonstrated two years ago in Plenty, playing another man of propriety married to a disturbed idealist. Covington, Tyzack and Haig (imported from the Royal Court Theater in London, where Tom and Viv was first produced last year) perform admirably in better roles, ones with a little shading, irony and spunk. Max Stafford- Clark's direction fills the stage at Manhattan's Public Theater with mausoleum...
...AGENT of this conflict, the character of Dolson is scarcely. Credible and even less like cable; with his wide-set eyes and square jaw, lvanek makes him appear almost Wagnerian in his stupidity. Presumably it is Dolson's duty, as the young idealist, the "hotheaded seminarian," to fight ceaselessly and crudely for truth, justice and the American way-sometime after his daily ten-mile run, presumably it is our duty to be charmed by the natural simplicity of his tantrums as when he a onetime bisexual, melodramatically denounces the Monsignor as a "homophobic autocral...