Word: mother
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...responds New York Times reporter Nicholas Gage (John Malkovich) to his wife's suggestion that he abandon his 30-year preoccupation with exposing the circumstances surrounding his mother Eleni's wrongful trial and death during the 1948 purges in Greece. Haunted by the memory of his mother being taken to a People's Democratic Army work camp just prior to his successful escape from Greece at the age of 9, Gage is determined to bring his mother's assassins to justice before the 30-year statute of limitations on war crimes runs...
...researches as well as set down his own recollections of what it was like to live in Greece during both World War II and the Greek Civil War. The result was characterized by a judicious mix of soft-soap elegizing about Gage's happy life with his mother and sisters before Greece's Civil War and hard-core indictments of the men who shattered their peaceful idyll...
Adapting the volume for the big screen, Gage has sacrificed much of the undercover reportage that made Eleni such a good read. He relies instead on a top-heavy selection of sentimental flashbacks featuring Eleni selflessly ministering to the needs of her children, sanctifying her as the archtypical Grecian mother-martyr. In so doing, Gage forgoes the realistic context essential to the docu-drama style he is ostensibly seeking (and had achieved in the book), ending up instead with a tear-soaked, superficial Monday Night at the Movies...
...picture Nelligan as Gage's angelic mother, imagine Sally Field as the widowed farm wife in Places in the Heart. But unlike Field, whose film character admittedly has a much less turbulent life story than does Eleni, Nelligan is unable to bring her character to life with remotely human inflections or gestures...
...fair, even if the material that Nelligan is given to work with is a bit unbelievable, her performance as a desperate mother who willingly sacrifices her own life in order that the lives of her children can be saved is unforgettable. Gage's bigger-than-life size version of his mother lingers indelibly...