Word: laura
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...Laura Quinn, fortyish, opens her suburban Boston home to Jim Cogan, 17, the son of Bronx relatives. He is awaiting arraignment in New York, charged with involvement in a lunatic guru's plot to blow up the public library. His future is on the line. If she hopes to persuade him to change, Laura realizes, she will have to put her past on the line...
...predictable: Matron meets the Son of Counterculture. Laura obediently bridles at the "spiritual onanism that leads these fools, these mindless children, to glorify themselves, or the self and its own ignorance." She is also physically stirred by Cogan, a shaggy "Montaigne in love beads, discarding whole areas of Western culture that do not serve him." Laura counterattacks with her "small focus of self-knowledge, the sweep of history," watches her admonitions founder against his coltish arrogance and her own proliferating self-doubts...
Then nothing and something happen. Laura and Jim remain at loggerheads, while a swarm of supporting players takes over the stage. Laura's beloved brother, killed in Korea, returns to haunt her. Bearing a blunted spear is her husband Harry, a disappointed lawyer-politician now resigned to tinkering with the Massachusetts Democratic Party machine. In come Jim's parents, a bewildered, gin-swilling mother and a gambling father off on a lifetime losing streak. The cast swells to include an Italian immigrant, a Jewish real estate tycoon and assorted Cogan relatives. Without warning, what might have been just...
Some of the stories of these interjected characters seem overheard; others are told by Laura herself. Their precise meanings are elusive, their relevance to Laura indeterminate. Yet all equate the passing of tune with irreparable loss, and Laura comes to understand the relationship between her dead brother and Jim: "I want to be as he is now, to crouch at the starting line and I'm furious that...
Hopefully everyone who was at the movie will have learned something, not just about racism, but also about the galling multiple insults and injuries which American society offers to our black and Third World sisters every day. Laura M. Burns...