Word: lemmons
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David Mamet and Jack Lemmon don't seem the likeliest combination: Mamet writes about the hard shell of life, Lemmon enacts the soft underbelly. Mamet, 45, celebrates ferocious winners, while Lemmon, 68, sentimentalizes good-guy losers. Yet twice within the past year, the two have teamed for poignant results, first in the 1992 film adaptation of Mamet's Pulitzer Prize play, Glengarry Glen Ross, and now in a surprisingly warm TV version of his 1977 off-Broadway hit, A Life in the Theatre. Mamet's austere, elliptic prose seems to bring out the best in Lemmon -- his naked frustration...
...Life in the Theatre remains, as it was on stage, a two-hander between a veteran actor (Lemmon) who never quite made it and a protege (Matthew Broderick) whose star is beginning to rise. Mamet has opened up the work shrewdly, placing the two men among backstage colleagues, on street corners, in neighborhood bars and coffee shops, making their encounters more naturalistic and believable. Yet he and director Gregory Mosher have retained enough of the stylized original to bring off satiric fragments of pseudo-plays -- costume epics and drawing-room comedies that are the antithesis of Mamet's blowtorch aesthetic...
...competitive now. The older man's brushes with self-destruction and madness are rooted in his loss of ease during the only part of the day that matters to him, the moments when the lights come on. Whether by design or happenstance, he is all the more touching because Lemmon's character comes across as vastly more talented than Broderick's. Only unconquerable age can lower...
...almost drown out the futuristic satire. Fearless transforms a disaster story into a meditation on mortality. BOOKS The J.F.K. presidency gets a cool, fascinating analysis by Richard Reeves. MUSIC Jimmy Webb soars into the '90s with a lush and lyrical album. TELEVISION An adapted David Mamet play shows Jack Lemmon at his best...
Between these poles, Jack Lemmon contributes a self-justifying monologue about a long-ago but devastating marital infidelity that is haunting in its self-delusions. Jennifer Jason Leigh as the mom with a sideline in dirty talk and Anne Archer as a woman whose part-time job is clowning for school kids superbly represent lower-middle-class economic desperation. And then there's Julianne Moore, whose doctor-husband (Modine) obsessively pesters her about a one-night stand she may or may not have had years ago. When she finally makes her long confession, she is half-naked -- a brave actor...