Word: mother
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that's when Dr. Livingston (Jane Fonda) enters the scene, armed with Dr. Freud and a court warrant, determined to find out if Agnes has all her marbles before the trial begins. Her efforts are slowed by the government, the Church, and, for her own reasons, the indomitable Mother Superior Anne Bancroft). All parties are determined to see the case quickly brushed under the rug, which places Fonda in her familiar, irritating role of crusader. Amusingly, Fonda chain smokes throughout the movie, which certainly won't sell any videos...
...PARTIES DRAG in their psychological garbage for viewer perusal, which consists mostly of good old-fashioned Catholic guilt. Livingston's sister died in a convent, so she would like to hate Catholicism, except her senile mother makes her feel guilty about being ungodly, and professional ethics call for objectivity in the case. Agnes thinks her child's father was God, so naturally she has ambiguous feelings towards her heavenly spouse. And poor Mother Superior has the misfortune of also being Agnes's aunt, which makes her feel responsible both for Agnes's abuse as a child and Agnes's eventual...
...what is likely good documentary form, Kerouac brings up all these issues without dwelling on any one in particular. The key issues surface--the author's Oedipal ties to his mother, his dabblings in Buddhism and his benzedrine-induced writing method, but although they're faithfully examined, Antonoli doesn't go beyond a cursory treatment of the straight facts...
...lifestyles and massive drug inhalations that shook some cultural foundations thirty years ago seem rather mainstream today. Even the lifetime chronicled in Kerouac has a definable pattern: Home-City-The Road-City-Home. Kerouac ends right where he began: as other Beats point out, the stabilty of home, his mother and his father is all he sought...
...Carney, a sympathetic neighbor, confesses to Macon that at times she feels like "a Gold Star mother": "Like someone who's suffered a loss in a war...and then forever afterward she has to go on supporting the war...because otherwise she'd be admitting the loss was for no purpose." Tyler, however, mourns the tragedy of the family less as a lost, noble cause than as an illusion offering the comforts of a live burial...