Word: joans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...story concerns an actress attempting a double comeback from alcoholism-professionally and as the mother of a teen-age child she had virtually abandoned. She has two friends, a ne'er-do-well actor and homosexual (James Coco) and a wealthy woman desperately afraid of aging (Joan Hackett). They are all self-pitiers and nonstop talkers, mostly in a manner that might be called show-biz fizz, a stylization that works all right for Simon onstage, but seems on the naturalistic screen an inhuman strain. This is especially so since most of his zingers are not as funny...
TRUE CONFESSIONS Directed by Ulu Grosbard Screenplay by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne...
...does the movie version, with Robert Duvall as Tom and Robert De Niro as Des, proceed at the sluggish pace of a Sodality novena? Perhaps because Dunne's collaborator on the screenplay was his wife, the Empress of Angst, Novelist Joan Didion. Onscreen, characters who should percolate with rage simply simmer. Two exciting, dangerous actors have little to do: Duvall spends too much time pacing and waiting; De Niro's big scene has him hanging up his vestments...
Director Frank Perry seems content simply to let Joan and Christina rant and rave at each other, and he makes few attempts to explain Joan's complex characters or to dig beneath the disputes for the real reasons for Crawford's mistreatment of her daughter. When the scenes roll around in which Joan is nice to her daughter, we are only further confused. The relationship between Christina and Joan is shown through a series of vignettes which take place over a span of 30 years, but these scenes are only loosely strung together. They argue here, they argue there, time...
...that Christina could not have resisted taking revenge on her mother, and it's too bad to see Joan Crawford posthumously dragged through the mud. Christina's attempt to cash in on her mother's problems shows very little class on her part. It would have been much better all around if this movie were never made...