Word: poignant
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...with at least 16 major regional stagings. The arrival of his new Wonderful Tennessee was a major Broadway event. Alas, so was its departure at week's end. A lesser work than Lughnasa, it failed because it is also a bleaker one. While Lughnasa portrayed in poignant detail the hard times of the five Mundy sisters in rural Ireland in 1937 and foreshadowed still worse things to befall them, the dominant memory it left was of the explosive eruption into revelry cited in the title. Amid reasons for sorrow, the Mundy women held onto joy. The three couples in Tennessee...
...Kenton; James Fox as Lord Darlington; Peter Vaughn as Stevens' father, the proud old retainer who will never say die -- even when he does. These characters, like those in The Age of Innocence, are all genteel anachronisms. They sin, in our eyes, by not daring to sin; they are poignant in their fidelity to tattered principles. The muted tones of Ivory's film tell you that this is a ghost story without corpses...
...Doerr's poignant portrait never lapses into sentimentality. The narrative voice thrives on an impassive, ineffably wise, yet indulgent tone which must reflect Doerr's 83 years. She never takes the easy option: Her book contains no blatant contrasts, no crass symbolism, no fortuitous plot-twists. She takes pains to tell you what's going to happen, and then manages to surprise you when it does...
Condemmed to the annoying stereotype of the neglected and nagging wife, Isabella Rosallini still manages to salvage the role to some extent with her beauty and permanently poignant demeanor. Rosie Perez draws out her role with hyper rawness, and provides a counterbalance to Bridge's brooding...
Altman based the film's nine interweaving narratives on his (mis)reading of Carver's ouevre, taking a set of poignant midwestern vignettes and turning them into a heavy-handed Hydra living out its pointless existence under the scorching sun of Los Angeles, the city where dreams die, or whatever. Setting "Short Cuts" in L.A., with all its metaphorical baggage, was a huge mistake on Altman's part, though only one of many. The main one was probably in trying to translate Carver's fragile stories to the screen in the first place...