Word: insightfulness
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...turbulent decades" of the union's history, beginning in untutored idealism and ending in equally unconscious corruption, suffers from the same flaw as do the fictions that have slunk out from under Harold Robbins' overcoat in recent years: what might be called the substitution of analogy for insight. In other words, the writers who create them seem to think it is enough to show us characters who, they suggest with a wink (or more often a brutal slam in the ribs), are just like the famous people we are always reading about in the press. Whereupon they offer...
...does the script, for which Stallone receives co-credit. It offers no psychological insight into what makes a Hoffa, and no historical insight into how the American labor movement so quickly deteriorated into self-serving materialism. That is perhaps excusable; what can you expect from people who not only were not present at the creation, but also never brush up against the modern working man except when they take their Mercedes in for repair...
What is difficult to understand is the film's utter lack of moral insight. One suspects that Stallone kept hoping to turn his labor leader into another Rocky, for, although his hero keeps trafficking with gangsters and tolerates much graft among his fellow unionists, he never gets upset about it because he 1) never takes anything for himself, and 2) insists that wretched means justify his ends: a strong union that enables its members finally to enjoy the pleasures of owning their very own campers, motorboats and other ecologically unsound objects. An actor, or writer, of parts might have...
Apparently neither Stallone nor anyone else who worked on this picture could bear to part with the lumpish likability that all tried so hard to establish at the beginning. In the end they sacrifice everything-insight, morality, a dramatic arc-to preserve intact their star's only known quality, best described as a sort of vulgar affability...
Erica is buoyed throughout by three only slightly caricatured women. The genuineness of these women (despite their New York-style eccentric sophistication) and their interaction with one another is what holds our attention; their other problems--with men--are predictable and add little insight. Yet the capacity for comfort brought into the four-woman sessions is moving and believable. Erica's daughter Patty is a precocious (but hardly obnoxiously so), loving daughter who sides with her mother yet cannot reject her father. Old plot, new faces. Lisa Lucas's performance is well-honed, though, and the scene designed to make...