Word: nathanity
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Styron's book, unfortunately, is not quite a masterpiece, and from its structure come the main cracks in a movie that otherwise lawlessly accomplishes its goal. As written, the story of Stingo. Sophie and Sophie's New York lover. Nathan, is immersed in almost 600 pages of self-conscious, intellectualized ramblings on Stingo's past his guilt and his sexual frustration. This literary technique takes some of the emphasis off the actual events he confronts...
...film's ability to bypass all this does wonders for the tale's drama and digestibility. But it also tends to turn marginal implausibilities most glaringly, the life led by the pivotal character. Nathan, played by Kevin Kline--into enigmas that strain the viewer's credibility. And the one scene that returns focus entirely to Stingo--a ludicrous unsuccessful sexual conquest--seems oddly out of place...
...Nathan offers other motives for Kerr's action. The lease for the base at Pine Gap was scheduled to expire on Dec. 10, Nathan says, and Whitlam had hinted that he might not renew the lease agreement with the U.S. In response, the CIA sent the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) a blistering cable. It said, in substance, that the U.S. agency might be forced to cut its ties to ASIO. The next day Kerr sacked Whitlam. Nathan notes that Kerr, an Australian-born lawyer, had been active in cultural front organizations funded...
Sophie Zawistowska is Camille at Auschwitz, the beautiful woman with a guilty secret, twice torn between two people she dearly loves, first in Poland, then in New York. Her catastrophic past has given her mercurial moods: giddy with ecstasy at the antics of her lover Nathan (Kevin Kline) and her puppy pursuer Stingo (Peter MacNicol), then darkly ruminative as memory provides her with waking nightmares. Even as sketched by Styron in overwrought prose, Sophie wove a spell over millions of readers...
...strong and beautifully detailed as the rest of Pakula's work, the events it depicts could have been narrated by Sophie in a few minutes, and should have been. (The film runs about 2½ hours.) But Sophie is not the only obsessed person in this romantic trinity: Nathan has his lunar side too, which flashes on and off at unexpected intervals. Kevin Kline is an engaging actor who can play both ends of passion, the delightful and the deranged. He cannot play both simultaneously-who could?-and his character suggests two halves of an incoherent whole...