Word: mother
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...emotion, there is something ruminative, at times woolly, about Timebends. The title seems to have been chosen to reflect its nonlinear, outwardly random structure, which in turn is apparently meant to evoke "time's fade-outs and fade-ins and cross-fades." His first words describe watching his mother's feet and ankles as he lay in infancy on the floor. Colorfully sketched relations come and go, their idiosyncratic histories often beguiling in themselves -- especially vivid is the dying great-grandfather who caught the new rabbi robbing him of his life's savings and pummeled the loot...
...along the Mob-dominated Brooklyn waterfront, making a movie in Nevada. Each story brings on the next before the first is quite concluded, in a fashion at times conversational, at times dramatically juxtaposed. Too often, the result just seems guarded. For example, Miller's first wife Mary Slattery, the mother of two of his children, appears only at the moment he is about to marry her. Their courtship and several years of living together -- no small adventure in those times for a Roman Catholic from Ohio and a Jew from New York City -- take place almost entirely offstage...
...mother Grace (Sarah Miles) is no saint, either. She married her lover's best friend because he could provide her stability. And--surprise, surprise--she's regretted the marriage ever since. Enter stupid subplot number one: with father away at war and Mac the lover still in town, and with Mac's wife Molly about to leave him, he tries to rekindle old flames with mixed results...
...Boorman proves unable to balance the serious nature of the events he depicts and the humorous episodes he describes. The serious often descends into the sentimental and the humorous into the cute. One moment, the family's house is burned to the ground, forcing them to move in with mother's grandparents. But no sooner are they there then Grandpa's comic zaniness changes the mood, as he interrupts breakfast on the veranda to shoot at a rat in his vegetable garden. The scene is absurd enough to make a Scrooge laugh, but it hangs loosely between serious scenes...
Students, alumni, and even Yale townies seem to find that this motto is just sharp enough to annoy Yalies, but not so obscene that it can't be worn by mother...