Word: lumet
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DANIEL, the much-touted "Rosenberg trial movie" of August, is simultaneously a nightmare, a documentary, and a work of pure fiction. The producers, Sidney Lumet and E.L. Doctorow, walk a tightrope between ideology and reality, fiction and non-fiction--and the balance they achieve is precarious at best...
Audiences will undoubtedly walk into Daniel thinking about the Rosenberg case and view the movie as a statement about the Rosenbergs. Ironically though, both Lumet and Doctorow downplay the parallel with the Rosenberg case, and consequently any social or political aspects of the film. For instance, they insist that the opening scene--a striking closeup of Daniel detachedly and encyclopedically describing the procedure of electrocution--is an artistic device. Lumet, who directed the film in addition to co-producing with Doctorow, calls the scene an interior monologue, designed to reveal how Daniel is objectively attempting to make sense of what...
DANIEL Directed by Sidney Lumet; Screenplay by E.L. Doctorow...
...convicted and executed for conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. But we know that the 1950s were a time of anti-Red hysteria; the sitting judge on the Rosenberg case might have been Joe McCarthy. How do we know? Daniel tells us so. Alas for Sidney Lumet, history hangs like a crape cloud over his new film. The Rosenberg File, just published to a chorus of raves, scrupulously documents Julius Rosenberg's involvement with a Soviet spy ring; Ethel was probably a knowledgeable but passive member of the cabal. Since the authors' preliminary findings were...
...generous for a moment. Grant Lumet and Screenwriter E.L. Doctorow (whose novel, The Book of Daniel, the film follows closely) creative license and a clean slate. Daniel is, after all, the story not only of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, but also of their children Daniel and Susan and their attempts to understand and revive what the film's press notes describe as the Isaacsons' "dream of social justice...