Word: mordantly
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There is no insecurity in Max von Sydow. He gives a towering performance. In intensity, innate authority and mordant humor, this is acting in the thermodynamic range. Bibi Andersson is pallid by comparison, a picture-postcard beauty who recites her lines without the intent to lacerate-rather strange considering her snake-fanged delivery as a wife in Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Eileen Atkins is in Von Sydow's league. She encases herself in a palpable shield of silence and then hurls her lines like javelins dead on the mark...
...pattern has become classic: a nation emerges from the colonial yoke, lustily declares its independence-and then succumbs to the totalitarian mode. French Philosopher Jean-Francis Revel, author of Without Marx or Jesus, tries to analyze this alarming trend in a book filled with mordant wit and intensity. As a kind of historical prosecuting attorney, Revel puts Joseph Stalin in the dock, then offers witnesses to the crime of totalitarianism. It was the murderous Russian dictator who showed the 20th century how to construct a hermetically sealed tyranny, says Revel. It is the Stalinist model that is being sedulously imitated...
...Naipaul's fiction, the landscape, mental as well as actual, has grown ever more terrifying. By contrast, he approaches India with a calm, almost religious detachment. The narrative is often mordant as it describes the dissonance of Indian life: the mutilated beggar children and the fashionable holy men, complete with pressagents; the landless peasants fleeing the villages for the city pavements, the infuriating smugness of the privileged...
...lively, mordant intelligence is at its best improvising on political ideas - quarreling with Spengler, hallucinating a Socratic dialogue with an Exxon executive. In the end, the author pays a visit of homage to the aging Arnold Toynbee - and plays his own complicated sense of disintegration and renewal against Toynbee's. Toynbee seems to listen with courtly regard as Mee excitedly spins out his vision of a new Renaissance based upon "a truly profound exploration led by neurophysicists and psychologists, structural linguists and anthropologists, into the structure of the mind." Mee demands to know what Toynbee thinks. The great historian...
...these points are admirably made, but they click into place a little too neatly. The film has an air of premeditation, an almost palpable sense of the film maker's mordant intelligence shaping the scenes. Of course, if you are a director making your first full-length feature, as Jean-Jacques Annaud is here, this is the kind of flaw to have. It certainly does not prevent Annaud from bringing things to a powerfully ironic finish...