Word: pallid
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Such reticence makes Adams' Eliza Hamilton Quarles a pallid, rather bloodless character. As a woman who came of age 20 years ago, Eliza is well versed in the arts of discretion and coping. She has to be. Her sexually ambivalent husband killed himself after becoming keen on a beautiful boy, leaving her with a baby daughter and an unfulfilled life. Eliza has little instinct for what her mother Josephine calls the "social realities." Josephine is formidable: a successful writer with another daughter and a number of former husbands left in or under the dust. She is also a hardheaded...
...weapon to retaliate against Dysart's incursions into his own psyche. Strang's special qualities compound the difficulty of the shrink's task; the adolescent's mercurial nature furnishes a painful counterpoint to his doctor's sterile intellectualism. Strang forces Dysart to tackle his own neuroses--which seem so pallid by comparison--while grappling with the wrenching monomania of the young patient. He is, in a clinical sense, the judge and the judged, by his own will...
There is no insecurity in Max von Sydow. He gives a towering performance. In intensity, innate authority and mordant humor, this is acting in the thermodynamic range. Bibi Andersson is pallid by comparison, a picture-postcard beauty who recites her lines without the intent to lacerate-rather strange considering her snake-fanged delivery as a wife in Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Eileen Atkins is in Von Sydow's league. She encases herself in a palpable shield of silence and then hurls her lines like javelins dead on the mark...
...Skala, belting out their monologues, Broadway-style, in a series of relentless closeups. Only in the evocative dance routines, staged by Choreographer Patricia Birch, does the cast reveal any grace. In fairness, it must be hard to contend with roles like these: most of the male characters are pallid Tennessee Williams retreads, and the women are mere camp stereotypes. The movie's two quasi narrators - a tough dance teacher with a 14-carat heart (Helen Gallagher) and a slick M.C. (Don DeNatale) - are shamelessly derived from such sources as Cabaret, Sweet Chanty and They Shoot Horses...
Remember Keaton in the Godfather movies? Not likely. She was invisible in The Godfather and pallid in The Godfather, Part II. She played Al Pacino's wife, and her role amounted to telling Pacino every now and then to stop killing people so often and spend some time with the kids. Says Keaton: "Pacino was great. Robert De Niro was great. I was background music...