Word: osmonds
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Having once dipped a toe into the waters of one's own TV show, there's no leaving it. A life of musical theater, race-car driving or doll collecting can sustain one for only so long. Thus it is with DONNY and MARIE OSMOND. Donny (who flirted with car racing) and Marie (who still collects dolls) will return to TV in a daytime talk and variety show in 1998. But can the world's two most famous living Mormons shed their baggage of terminal cuteness? The suits in TV land seem to think so. "They're in their...
...goes to Italy to begin her quest to "see life," but through the plotting of a duplicitous friend, Madame Merle (Barbara Hershey), gets ensnared by a cold-hearted aesthete and fortune-hunter, Gilber Osmond (John Malkovich). Their marriage quickly sours, and tensions between them rise to a crisis. First, Lord Warburton, Isabel's old suitor, reappears and begins to pay court to Pansy, Osmond's lovely but completely subjugated daughter. Later, Isabel learns that her cousin Ralph is dying...
...director's style enshrouds the story in an atmosphere of mystery that is further accentuated by Kidman's engimatic remoteness. The pain of Isabel is evident, but not the inner spirit that makes her so attractive to Ralph Touchett (and so aggravating to Osmond). This may be due more to the scripting of the role than to her acting, but in any case it is Isabel more than any other character whom we find fundamentally unfathomable. Why does she submit to such a wretched marriage? What is it that she wants? Whom does she truly love...
...other hand, the character of the superlatively cultured and corrupted Madame Merle, Osmond's female counterpart and ally, is as complex as Isabel's yet far more comprehensible and as effectively conveyed, if not more so, in the film by Campion as in the book. The rest of the acting is good as well, though Malkovich's Osmond is a bit too repulsive to convince us that Isabel could ever have fallen...
...easy to see why Isabel would attract Campion (The Piano), who is drawn to women trying to assert themselves against the social and sexual rigidities of their moment. On the other hand, Isabel's unfathomable devotion to the contemptible aesthete Gilbert Osmond (whose black heart John Malkovich always wears on his sleeve) seems in particular to flummox her feminism. This leads her and screenwriter Laura Jones to soften James' bleak conclusion, but long before that, this Portrait has blurred to the point of indistinction...