Word: lear
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...most of his career, however, Kline has got nearly every job he wanted. The roll began with a Tony-winning supporting part as Bruce Granit, an egomaniacal actor in the 1978 musical On the Twentieth Century; that led sitcom producer Norman Lear to beg unsuccessfully for his services. Another Tony followed for his performance as the Pirate King opposite Linda Ronstadt in The Pirates of Penzance in 1981. Movie roles came just as quickly after he landed the highly coveted male lead in Sophie's Choice, opposite eventual Oscar winner Meryl Streep; in 1988 Kline won his own Academy Award...
...have to grant a certain credit to novelist Jane Smiley for the unapologetic boldness with which she appropriated the story of King Lear for her Pulitzer prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, resettling his mythical Britannic majesty and his fractious daughters on a modern Iowa farm. You also have to admire the nerve with which she attached pop-psych subtexts to her rearrangement, the daring with which she turned the whole works into a feminist tract...
...just that the Lear figure, played by Jason Robards, has been renamed Larry and dressed in coveralls, or that he decides to divide his realm among his daughters for tax purposes, although these devices have a certain flattening effect on the tale. The problem is that it is no longer his tragedy but his children's--Goneril, who is here renamed Ginny and played by Jessica Lange; and Regan, who's called Rose and impersonated by Michelle Pfeiffer; and Cordelia, known now as Caroline and acted by Jennifer Jason Leigh...
...Thousand Acres" is derived from Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, itself a loose adaptation of King Lear that carries Shakespeare's plot into present-day Iowa. The film veers wildly between a pedestrian fidelity to Smiley's words and a surprising negligence of her plot sequence. The film works, but not nearly as well as it should...
...familiar tragedy is made potent by the value of the gift withdrawn: Isaac, whose life is his mind, is losing it. Rifkin sees the majesty in Isaac's madness; he soars as he declines. In an era when films reduce the aged to comic cranks, Rifkin is heroic--the Lear of grumpy...