Word: motheral
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with notables from Errol Flynn to Cardinal Spellman to Irving Berlin. But obscurity overtook her, and in later years she viewed her life as a cosmic joke: she had become one of the most famous people in the nation simply because of a debutante party. She repudiated her promiscuous mother and grandmother, both coarse social climbers who married for money, and retreated into reclusiveness, alcoholism and drug addiction. Alas, the poor little rich girl is now an American cliche, but Gioia Diliberto's carefully researched portrait offers a wealth of revealing social history...
...Palma does not waste a shot. The result is a densely layered work moving with confident, compulsive energy. One sequence is set in Chicago's Union Station, where Ness and Stone must take a key witness from the Mob's protective custody. Into their stakeout blunders a mother maneuvering a baby carriage up a staircase. What delirious conflict between Ness the lawman and Ness the family man, as he tries to protect the infant and simultaneously conduct a shoot-out. What wild comedy in this conflict between duty and humanity. And De Palma ices the cake by shooting the scene...
...world as it is, she seems only to have the place of a designation. The Aged Mother. Like a painting of the aged mother, or a play called The Aged Mother, or an essay in a magazine. Swathed in the shapeless dress, the indefinite hairdo, she has become something to be noticed and attended, as if she were forever on the verge of vanishing lest one remind oneself to look in on Mother. (And how's your mother...
...woman still a mother? Impertinent question. You dared not ask it on Mother's Day pumped up with bonhomie, but now a few weeks afterward, in the cooler hours, the problem takes a tomblike shape. In terms of technical, logical definition, can a mother be a mother without doing a mother's things? At her advanced stage of life is she supposed to function institutionally, monumentally, like mother nature, mother wit? Mother Russia: perhaps she is to be seen as Yeats' country for old men. Mother earth: big as all outdoors. Not her, the featherweight fossil in your arms...
...When a mother grows old, the nature and perception of her role as mother changes. Is she, at long last, a person...