Word: lloyd
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Prospects for reversing that outlook in the Senate are dim. Finance Committee chairman Lloyd Bentsen will try to stop the capital-gains cut by offering as an alternative broader IRAs, without any tax increase to make up the revenue loss. Failing that, some Democrats favor strategy to combine the capital-gains cut in a monster tax-and-spending bill with so many provisions unacceptable to Bush that he will be forced to veto it. That risks triggering the automatic spending cuts mandated by Gramm-Rudman-Hollings if there is no agreement by Oct. 16 to hold the deficit...
Samantha Hughes (Emily Lloyd) of In Country, an adaptation of the novel by Bobbie Ann Mason, is a direct, even artless, projection of this healing spirit. There is nothing metaphoric about the empty space left in her life by the war; her father was killed in Viet Nam before she could know him. Her mother having remarried and moved away, Samantha has chosen to stay behind and share the tumbledown family home in Hopewell, Ky., with her uncle Emmett (Bruce Willis), a veteran damaged by the war in some way he refuses to name. Now in the summer after...
Samantha's straight-ahead spirit as evoked by Lloyd is irresistibly winning. Eventually it becomes the wedge that pries Emmett out of his shell and forces the girl's grandmother Mamaw (Peggy Rea) to face the feelings that she too has denied since her son's death. These are superb performances as well: Willis has never employed his alert reserve to better effect; Rea perfectly catches both the refrigerator-tidying comedy and the unspoken yearnings of an American Everymom...
Part of the problem with the movie lies in the fact that Lloyd's portrayal of Samantha as a dizzy, under-educated Southerner fails to lend her character either sympathy or depth. Part of the problem lies with the screenwriters Frank Pierson and Cynthia Cidre, whose dialogue is often inept and who are unable to find the coherence behind the episodic novel by Bobbie Ann Mason upon which In Country is based...
...result of a bad screenplay and a poor acting job on the part of Lloyd is a movie which lacks pacing, coherence and emotional depth for its first hour. But as In Country shifts its focus more toward the relationship between Samantha and Emmett, the movie gains a lot of the truth and pathos which was missing from the start...