Word: melodrama
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...sober realism of her style that redeemed the novel, its weight and conviction that prevented readers from noticing (or caring) that by replacing noble enigmas with banal behaviorism, Smiley had downsized tragedy to melodrama. The movie version--bereft of diverting literary stratagems, relentlessly focused on what-next narrative--takes it another step down--to soap opera...
...melodrama was set in Burlington, N.C., a small town about 20 miles from Greensboro, where Dorothy Hutelmyer was twice president of the PTA, her husband Joseph coached baseball and ran Seaboard Underwriters, and Lynne Cox worked as his secretary. The Hutelmyers' was "a storybook marriage," says Dorothy's lawyer Jim Walker. "He wrote poetry to her, love songs...
...name is Freddy Heflin, and in Cop Land--a sharp-eyed character study and virtuoso acting class masquerading as a violent melodrama--he is played by Sylvester Stallone. This time Hollywood's longest lived action star is not battling Apollo Creed or the Vietnamese or a killer mountain, but his own rep as a stolid, vaguely comic, pre-Modernist hunk-lunk. Freddy is surrounded by guys who think they're men because they carry guns in the big city. But Sly is crowded too--by an intimidating gang of quality thesps, including Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Ray Liotta...
...fine, dreamlike first novel, The Light of Falling Stars (Riverhead; 308 pages; $23.95), J. Robert Lennon does start off with an air crash, not far from a Montana town he calls Marshall. But he declines his own generous offer of melodrama (and of irony too, for that matter) and proceeds to a far more interesting narration that amounts to a kind of anti-melodrama. The plane falls, townspeople grieve and attend funerals. But enemies are not reconciled, deep perceptions are not arrived at, lovers do not see each other more clearly and dearly. Paul and Anita, a shakily married couple...
This might be a Gaslight-style melodrama. Mrs. Brown, though, is a true story, about Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) and her long grief after Prince Albert's death. When her intimacy with Brown (Billy Connolly) becomes known, demands to abolish the monarchy ring through Parliament, forcing Prime Minister Disraeli (Antony Sher) to call on Brown. Her Majesty must be coaxed out of hibernation and back to her people...