Word: leanness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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These are awesome images, astonishing images. But in the superb film that David Lean has made from E.M. Forster's sublime novel A Passage to India, their function far transcends the purely pictorial. In Lean's cinema there is no such thing as an idle shot, something that survives to the final cut merely because it is striking in its beauty or novel in its impact. Particularly in the Lean films that people conveniently but mistakenly identify as "epics" or "spectacles"?movies like The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago?the largest weight...
This is perhaps truer than ever in Passage. Like Forster, Lean uses India not just as a colorful and exotic setting but as a decisive force in shaping the story he is telling, almost as a character. And as a resonant symbol: of the unknowable and chaotic universe everyone inhabits; of the unknowable and chaotic inner life that inhabits everyone. Those images in which man's pretensions to power, to mastery over self and fate, are trivialized, swallowed up in the vastness of the Indian earth and sky, are careful, conscious efforts to express the film's theme visually without...
This is a daring strategy, especially since Lean is not a man who likes to explain what he is doing, much less call attention to his command of technique or to his personality or creative philosophy. He is assuredly an auteur, but not one who uses that status to gain entr�e to the talk shows and the rest of celebrity's dubious glories. Nevertheless, Passage has been doing excellent business in the three cities where it has opened in the past two weeks?New York, Los Angeles and Toronto?and it is already being recognized as a major achievement...
...Lean's risky enterprise appears likely to pay off handsomely. But make no mistake; it was probably the most audacious chance yet taken by this 76-year-old director, whose movie career and stylistic roots go back to the days of silent film, which coincide roughly with the period in which Forster's novel was finished...
...real risk was one of the spirit rather than the purse. For Lean had not made a movie since 1970, when he completed the critically and financially disappointing Ryan's Daughter. He passed some of the ensuing years in bitterness, wounded by reviewers who so often tend to listen to movies more intently than they look at them, thus missing much of his special grace and subtlety. Some of his time was wasted on a two-part retelling of the saga of Captain Bligh and the Bounty, which its producer either could not or would not finance in its full...