Word: pinter
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...this week's cover package on Actress Meryl Streep, Corliss delved into the literary and structural artifices that characterize her new movie The French Lieutenant's Woman. Corliss, who also wrote last year's cover story on the prime-time television soap opera Dallas, found Harold Pinter's transmutation of John Fowles' multilayered novel into a film-within-a-film a challenging experiment. Concludes Corliss: "Because of its complexity and cerebral detachment, The French Lieutenant's Woman is a difficult film to fall in love with-but the performance by Streep...
MARRIED. Harold Pinter, 50, English playwright (The Homecoming, Betrayal); and Lady Antonia Fraser, 48, socialite and biographer (Mary Queen of Scots, Royal Charles); both for the second time; in London. Lady Antonia has six children from her marriage to Tory M.P. Hugh Fraser; Pinter has one son from his marriage to Actress Vivien Merchant...
...those moments when Pinter permits his characters to behave like familiar people, feeds them flowing dialogue and critical musings, the actors excel. Jordan is charmingly lost as he flirts with Emma, mourning his painful life as the prince of emptiness ruling over the state of Catatonia. Appropriately bemused, Benedict describes the ritual squash game which precedes the ritual "winner buys" lunch. Agutter's role is most difficult, for she is not given such an opportunity to step away from her job as walking chess piece. Only in the early love scenes with Jerry can she display any character...
...Pinter has chosen characters who dwell comfortably in the intellectual world: editors of literary magazines at Oxford and Cambridge, publishers of books, people who include Yeats in their suitcases when packing for vacation. Such characters allow him to demonstrate larger truths about the place of the intellect in friendship and love, particularly when it rationalizes away responsibility. Jerry has no guilt over his affair with Emma until it is long-finished, when Emma tells him over a drink that Robert knows. "But he is my best friend," Jerry whines, as if confronting the fact for the first time. By moving...
...this does little more than elegantly demonstrate a truth about ourselves. By anticipating and reconstructing the action before us, we become Pinter's partners in chess. But it is the playwright's job to be more than a play-mate. He should tell us that we only live once and should therefore sleep with our best friends' wives, or let us know that it is wrong to manipulate friendships by manipulating facts. Pinter has laid the groundwork for such conclusions, but we still await them...