Word: motheral
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...DARK. A mother's nightmare -- the loss of her baby -- is compounded when she is wrongly convicted of murdering the infant. Meryl Streep is awesomely austere as the second victim in this tough-minded drama, based on a 1980 case in Australia...
Estonian assertiveness has led to a backlash in the Russian-speaking community, where a group known as Intermovement has emerged to challenge the Popular Front. Intermovement claims 90,000 members, mostly workers in industrial areas where ethnic Russians predominate. Economist Konstantin Kiknadze, an Intermovement leader whose mother is Russian and whose father is Georgian, charges that the Popular Front wants to "exchange a Moscow bureaucracy for one that is Estonian...
...stand-in for Weller is Martin (Christopher Collet), a gawky and irritable but predictably literate youth whose clumsy idealism embraces everything from ending the cold war to a metaphorically equivalent attempt to halt the chilly state of nonrecognition between his mother and father. The parents are former leftist activists who once lived for "the movement" and each other, and now find only regret in recalling either ardor. The father (Jeffrey DeMunn) is genial enough -- a mildly successful photographer who deflects his son's attempts to romanticize him -- although his affability fades into meanspirited vehemence at the least challenge to macho...
...character comes exuberantly alive. Vitality and beauty are common enough in star turns; so is warmth, although Nelligan, whose technical gifts are extraordinary, has never before shown it to this degree on the U.S. stage, and only once on film, in her 1985 performance as a heroic Greek mother in Eleni...
...when she serves a dinner of warm milk (hers liberally laced from a pocketbook flask) in an apartment without electricity, to the climactic reunion, when she arrives unkempt in a bedraggled housecoat and proceeds to exude glamour and sophistication from every pore, she makes life an adventure. Unlike the mother in The Glass Menagerie, whose tale of having 17 gentlemen callers seems a sad fib, Elise is convincing when she says, "I used to make quite the impression when I entered a room. I stood perfectly still, and everything moved in my direction...