Word: moms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...these the Cleavers or the Bunkers, this family of four preparing for an ordinary Thanksgiving in 1973? There's Dad (Carroll O'Connor), screwing himself into his easy chair, deflecting harsh words and harder responsibilities. Mom (Frances Sternhagen) is patrolling the house in her robe and bunny snood, calling "Wakey uppy! Wakey uppy!" in the tinny cascades of Texas motherhood. Sis (Linda Cook) is chatting on the phone with her boyfriend and threatening to "devote my entire life to crisis counseling for the holiday-impaired. My mother can be the poster child." And young Jeremy (Christopher Fields), just back from...
...mentions it, but this funny and harrowing play takes place in a Dallas suburb on the tenth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. The coincidence of dates sends Home Front aloft toward political metaphor. Dad may be every "reasonable" statesman who led the U.S. deeper into Viet Nam; Mom and Sis could be every uncommitted American woman, worried sick about her boy or her beau, but hoping against all evidence for the best. And Jeremy may not be kidding when he says that in Viet Nam "I died." Alive or dead, he is the twisted ghost of every Camelot...
...guilty secret than, in his sister's words, "a terminal jerk"; and Dad must expose himself as a paranoiac patriarch whose home is his castle, moated by ignorance. For the two hours preceding this pirouette into psychodrama, Home Front is fiercely sympathetic to all of its characters. Beneath Mom's lyrical ditsiness and Dad's clumsy evasions are two frightened people who care, beyond words, for their son. But because Jeremy's rage is beyond their comprehension, they can only stand by, then stand firm, as the boy plays out his nightmare...
...Rydell, who directed The Reivers and On Golden Pond, knows how to keep this stuff moving, if not how to make it moving. Here is a story ripped from today's headlines--BAD TIMES FOR THE SMALL FARMER--filmed in a style of roseate elegy. Everything is romanticized, from Mom biting into the season's first ear of corn to Junior eating Oreos on the cab of the family flatbed truck as God's sun sets behind him. Gibson's baby-faced doggedness and Spacek's ingratiating freckles suit them more for roles as college quarterback and star cheerleader than...
Last night Walt Whitman had the strangest dream. There he was, staring out his bedroom window, when who should hop in but Huck Finn, itching to travel. "Dress warmly," Walt's dead mom told him. And we're off to see Louisa May Alcott, who's having an affair with a Tahitian prince. Over there's Charlotte Cushman, the noted actress, playing Hamlet to Emily Dickinson's Ophelia; they become co-stars and lovers. Old Ralph Waldo Emerson is having a chat with the dead Henry David Thoreau: "Sex can be messy...