Word: mangold
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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STARRING: Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie DIRECTOR: James Mangold OPENS: Dec. 21 in N.Y.C. and L.A.; wide...
...that director (and final-draft writer) James Mangold has botched the job. It's just that he made something rather conventional out of a memoir that was spare, terse and elliptically funny. And naturally, the film's attitude toward its patients is the only acceptable one these days: that they may be saner than their keepers--especially since this is the '60s, when the outside world is so crazy...
...Land scans like an Eastern Western: High Noon without the clock, or a Shane in which the hero is the homesteader (played by Van Heflin, whose name has an echo in Freddy's). "I wanted to make a simple morality play," says James Mangold, 33, the writer-director whose only previous feature was the low-budget love story Heavy but who manages the complex story and big-name cast with a veteran's assurance. Mangold grew up in a blue-collar town near West Point, up the Hudson from the film's fictional Garrison, N.J. It was filled with "cops...
...toughest role and does wonders with it. He gets to play ambiguities. Stallone has to dramatize indecision; he does it by carefully plodding toward Freddy's crisis. He describes the sheriff as "a noble turtle," and during the shoot he kept a small turtle in his pocket. Mangold wanted the star to lose his chiseled look, so Stallone gained 40 lbs. of flab--a condition he often felt obliged to explain. "He'd say, 'Hey, I'm doing a movie, that's why I'm heavy,'" Liotta recalls. "He'd say this to a perfect stranger." Sly's first words...
Stallone has long been underestimated because of his thick speech and droopy demeanor. But his Cop Land colleagues speak of him with fond admiration. "Sly's a smart guy," Mangold attests. "He has a strong script instinct about how to hit the important beats of the scene." Stallone also knew how the film could help him. "Sly wanted to be with other real actors and feel alive in a dramatic scene," Mangold says. "I think this was not so much a career move for Sly as a personal decision to want to feel the joy of making a film...