Word: nortone
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These are creatures of the extremes; Norton the actor likes to walk on that serrated edge. So the shock of Keeping the Faith is that it isn't at all shocking. Its three attractive characters are, basically, celibate. Like the way-better Broadcast News, this is a film about friends obsessed with their work. Father Brian and Rabbi Jake amuse their congregations with hip jokes (it's how Sam Kinison and Jackie Mason got started), while Anna toils as a corporate fixer: "I talked McDonald's out of the McOyster...
...stupidly at the end of Act 2, so there can be an Act 3. Like most recent films, it's long on running time and short on visual elegance. But it has a warming reticence, a fond awareness of its characters' frailties. Elfman is a natural; she radiates. And Norton is excellent at playing that rarity, a man with a heart both cunning and innocent. He even dyed his hair blond because "I wanted Brian to have a halo--a sun-kissed, God-touched kind of thing." As we said: blessed...
...there's a curse on Norton, it is his unease at fame. "He's not comfortable with being famous," says Stuart Blumberg, his Yale buddy who wrote Keeping the Faith. "He hasn't mastered the art of being a fake celebrity. But to his friends, Edward's the quintessentially normal guy. He's funniest when he's just being a nerdy goofball...
...Norton manages to deflect conversation about his public private life by analyzing the public's urge to celebritize actors. "In the absence of collective gods," he says, "we've created a poor man's Olympus in our entertainers. We've taken the clowns and elevated them to minor deities. We revere our clowns a little too much. But strip away all the nonsense that surrounds the movie business and, at its core, our kind of storytelling fills a real social, almost metaphysical need. People need and want the experience of getting together to watch stories. Films are our most potent...
Nice words. They could go into a speech on Oscar night 30 years from now, when actor-director-writer-producer Edward Norton accepts the Irving G. Thalberg Award...