Word: leanness
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Such is the artistry of David I can. Throughout his 42-year career, including such films as Doctor Zhivago, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia, Lean has been known for the intensity of his images. His newest effort, an adaptation of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, is another sweeping, superbly majestic movie, which conveys the plight of the lone, insignificant individual in a vast, inscrutable universe...
...PASSAGE TO INDIA. The subcontinent is not merely the setting for David Lean's masterly adaptation of E.M. Forster's novel; it is its heroically scaled hypnotic central character...
Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of his films, intimate or expansive in scale, return obsessively to the same theme: a lone individual voyages out from familiar surroundings into exotic ones. These characters are tested (as Lean has liked to test himself on the far-flung locations of his wandering life), forced to examine their assumptions about themselves, the world, their places in it. All of them must affirm their humanity against the indifference?the muddle?of whatever corner of the unhelpful universe they find themselves. All discover, sooner or later, happily or unhappily, that their original certainties...
...insisting on that point. No, he said, responding testily to reviews of a theatrical adaptation of his book, it was not merely about the incompatibility of East and West. It was about "the difficulty of living in the universe." In other words, it was, among other things, a David Lean movie waiting to be made. And now we have it, sober and witty, subtle yet eminently approachable. It is a movie both true to its source and true to the highest imperatives of its own medium. Above all, it is true to our sense of the world as it echoes...
...that it is impossible to walk around in Macondo because of the empty bottles, the cigarette butts, the gnawed bones, the cans and rags and excrement that the crowd which came to the burial left behind; now is the time to lean a stool against the front door and relate from the beginning the details of this national commotion, before the historians have a chance...