Word: lumet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MINDS of many film critics and committed moviegoers, Sidney Lumet has been tried, convicted and sentenced. His offence against the entertainment world: wilfully tampering with Peter Shaffer's masterpiece Equus in Lumet's film adaptation of what may be the play of the '70s. Reviewers have pilloried Lumet for abandoning the example of the record-shattering Broadway production, and instead applying his personal imprint to the movie version. But such bad-mouthing has an unfair ring; if the director had retained the heavy-handed horse symbolism of the stage version, the critics' court probably would have found Lumet guilty...
...dominate the film's visual dimension: a close-up of the doubt-ridden psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Burton) musing about the complex case of his teenage patient Alan Strang (Firth), and a darkness-clothed scene of a naked Strang standing beside a horse, the object of his near psychotic obsession. Lumet fills his lens with Dysart's ruminating face, punctuating the narrative with the Shakespearean soliloquies of the confused shrink. At times, these infrequent monologues border on the histrionic, as Burton casts off the necessary restraint of a film star and takes on the exaggerated inflections of a stage actor...
...LUMET'S FILM does not limit itself to playing out fascinating mind games. As might be expected from a movie based on a play bursting with totem-like symbols, Equus is studded with the type of rich imagery that will easily come to mind with the mere mention of the film's title. Many viewers of Equus will fasten onto the scene of the nude Strang riding a madly galloping steed, a union of man and beast thrown into relief by backgrounds that alternate between the darkest of nights and a blinding brilliance of light. But the segment that qualifies...
...equally testing juncture shows a kneeling Strang in his room, a makeshift harness with reins attached to his head, beating his right thigh with a stick that passes for a riding crop, as his appalled father looks on. Ultimately, the treatment of these segments may certainly seem gratuitous, but Lumet did not aim at merely shocking his viewer. Rather, he tries to underscore the intensity of his protagonist's monomania...
...exchanges between Equus 'antagonists are scarcely more exciting. Firth's performance, seemingly so natural in a theater, looks artificial in closeup. Burton provides a curiously bland Dysart who lacks the high-pitched emotional constipation that both Anthony Hopkins and Alec McCowen brought to stage productions. Lumet tries to save the day by flooding Burton's speeches with melodramatic lighting and music, but no such makeshift remedy can cure Equus of its congenital limp. - Frank Rich