Word: portnoy
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Paisan. Rosssellini's classic neo-realist film of post-World War II. Allied occupation of Italy. With Socrates, made by the Italian master for French TV (a Boston premiere). CENTRAL SQUARE CINEMA II. Paisan: 8:05, Socrates: 6, 10. Portnoy's Complainst. A vile reduction of the mythically pornographic Philip Roth novel about a successful Jewish lawyer and civil libertarian who couldn't help privately pulling his putz. Gone is the gloriously-guilt-ridden self-consciousness of the main character, replaced with the smirk of writer-producer-director Ernest Lehman. PI ALLEY, continuous every two hours from...
Most damaging of all is Lehman's dirty little mind. The book began with Portnoy explaining his mother's influence as well as her ubiquity: "She was so deeply embedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise." The movie begins with Benjamin listening to Some Young Thing in his office as he mentally strips her: Portnoy not as mother-flustered, but as girl-hungry...
...GRANTS Mrs. Portnoy is definitely TV, with sprayed hair, straight nose, facile mannerisms. Karen Black as the Monkey manages to convey sexual elasticity but is pretty hommed in by the rest of the film, as is Jack Somack who as the father has a great constipated look...
...Lehman was going to make it a film for the ears, he could at least have been faithful to the book. Roth's Portnoy eventually loses and gains inhibitions in Israel: he loses paranoia in the Homeland where everything is Jewish ("I am playing in a sea full of Jews! Look at their Jewish limbs moving through the Jewish water!") but he also loses his potency. Internal restrictions replace imagined outer ones. And kvetching gets you nowhere...
After all, for God's sake, Portnoy's Complaint is something you can take your mother...