Word: madwoman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...With a madwoman--who may not really be crazy, though everyone tells her she is--a conniving old woman who screams "Oedipus" with every word to the squabbling heirs, Suddenly sounds like a soap opera set in Rappacini's garden. There's even an implied castration...
Somebody did make Fatal Attraction. And this fall, what if became wow! Striking moviegoers with the startling power of a madwoman in your bathroom, Paramount's lurid romantic thriller is the zeitgeist hit of the decade. It has been box-office champ for each of its first seven weeks in release, and shows little sign of slackening. Last week it reached the $80 million mark, to rank as the year's second highest grossing film. It's the movie with something for almost everybody. Says Michael Douglas, who plays Dan: "People leave saying 'I laughed, I got turned...
...obscenity and poof! disappears; a corpse is bound and bowed like a Kienholz sculpture; the climactic gun battle takes just a few shorthand strokes. The acting styles collide fiercely too. MacLachlan and Dern have an innocents-in-hell sweetness; Stockwell does a preening Percy Dovetonsils number; Rossellini is a madwoman with all stops out; Hopper tops her, with maybe the vilest sadistic creep in movie history...
...because Plummer performs the role of Agnes with quivering openness and absolute accuracy. Something in her gentle, husky voice--genetic courtesy of Mother Tammy Grimes--seems tailor made for the part of the young nun. In her hands Agnes degenerates into neither a foolish, mooning saint nor an unbelievable madwoman...
...insanity." Mad or just modern, it hardly matters, for Sarah is above all an actress. In one of the film's most powerful scenes, we find Sarah in her room, at her mirror. One hand clutches her shawl, the other furiously sketches self-portraits-anguished cartoons of the madwoman of Lyme Regis. They could be rough drafts for an asylumed future, or rehearsals for her climactic meeting with Charles, but they are certainly the carefully fevered preparations an actress makes for her big scene...