Word: metaphor
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...Audubon Society Book of Water Birds (Abrams; 256 pages; $35) presents enthralling photographs of creatures that seem made for metaphor. They are clouds hovering pink and white across the surface of a lake, dive bombers plummeting to strike seaborne prey, bankers in tuxedoes posing in comic solemnity at a social event on an ice floe. But the easy, intelligent prose of Authors Les Line, Kimball L. Garrett and Kenn Kaufman allows the real creatures -- from the lava heron of the Galapagos to the bald eagle -- to emerge from the metaphors in full dimension. Not all the faces are pretty...
...President led the Soviet leader to a little study next to the Oval Office and produced a baseball that Joe DiMaggio had hoped to have autographed by Gorbachev at the state dinner the night before. Reagan was not just fulfilling the old Yankee slugger's request. He had a metaphor in mind. Are we, he asked, going to play ball? Yes, Gorbachev firmly agreed. Then the two men rejoined their top aides in the Oval Office for a critical hour-long bargaining session on ways to reduce their bloated arsenals of strategic weapons...
...opening of Japan to the West (Pacific Overtures, 1977); a murderous barber with a Marxist-sounding class grievance and a woman companion who cooks his victims in pies (Sweeney Todd, 1979); the impossibility of marriage (Company, 1970); and the decline of the chorus-girl kick line as a metaphor for the loss of American innocence (Follies, 1971). Like Picasso, who painted a few realistic canvases as if to demonstrate he could, or Eugene O'Neill, who leavened his epic tragedies with one comedy of formula perfection, Ah, Wilderness, Sondheim proved in his lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy...
Ignore this considerable defect, and you can take solemn pleasure in Director Martin Ritt's familiar craftsmanship. You can enjoy the strong performance by Richard Dreyfuss (as Claudia's public and private defender). You may even smile at Streisand's straining to create another movie metaphor for her own fettered Hollywood eminence. Claudia, like Yentl before her, is a smart, sexy woman whose place of respect the boys in power want to deny. Streisand, who has both power and respect, might be advised to use that leverage on a project less conventional and complacent than this very mixed Nuts...
...fierce, futile independence. Although joined by fine, mostly British actors -- Jenny Agutter, Michael Gough and Rachel Gurney among them -- Jacobi gives what approximates a masterly one-man show. In a brilliantly calibrated scene near the end, he makes Turing's happiest moment also serve as a sad metaphor for his yearning, and inability, to communicate. He enfolds himself in the arms of a Greek youth, neither able to speak the other's language. Embraced, contented, he is still alone with his thoughts...