Word: poeticize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Swan Lake, Minnesota (ARTS). Swan maidens in tutus riding bales of hay up a conveyor belt? This poetic, disarmingly simple adaptation of the classic ballet inventively mixed a country-and-western twang with Tchaikovskian lyricism...
...novel. But Reuben's prize jackanapes is Tom Conti. This delightful English actor (TV's The Norman Conquests) uses all his honed tools-the dimples, the fluty voice, the hermit-crab walk, the little-boy eyes-to steal every scene just by being in it. Petty and poetic, desperate and delightful, Conti's Gowan is the funniest portrayal of a down-on-his-art genius since Alec Guinness's Gulley Jimson in The Horse's Mouth. It is certainly reason enough for a grownup to go back to the movies again...
...dissolving past, into the long nights of desire and failure. For the next 35 years, directors took their cue from Williams' own lazy flights of self-destruction, from his wispy-wise, Percy Dovetonsils voice, and launched productions of his plays on gossamer wings toward the aerie of poetic eccentricity. In the Williams otherworld, one tiptoed through cobwebs, was blinded by moonbeams...
What this poetic approach too often misses is Williams' deft and impish sense of humor. The Glass Menagerie is autobiography in the form of a situation comedy. The first half of the play could be called "Mama's Family": Amanda Wingfield, a fiftyish matron whose husband abandoned her 15 years earlier, plots to find a "gentleman caller" who will support her and marry her shy, lame daughter Laura. In the second half, a young man does call-no gentleman, rather an awkward go-getter whose own glory days are long past-and a bittersweet romance flutters through...
...easiest way to praise a film is to call it poetic. The easiest way to dump on a film is to call it unrealistic. Believability is the line drawn in the dirt; on either side are warring sensibilities, rival gangs of moviegoers or critics. Seen this way, the defenseless movie is reduced to a Rorschach inkblot, an excuse for prolonging the debate between fantasy and naturalism...