Word: portnoy
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...conditions of his birth made Father Portnoy beleaguered and constipated in a Gentile world. In his discursive flight from his own beleaguerment Alex began to compensate for Father's restricted state with a vengence: he because frantically effusive and unbelievably potent...
...most Freudian melodramas, Mama is the culprit: lapping, pawing, hugging, and not much comfort to a young Portnoy, seeing outside the Jewish womb, beyond the intellectual, cultural and religious worlds of his parents. Alex wanders like...
Sadly, Ernest Lehman's mishmash movie of Portnoy's Complaint, which opened June 27 in Boston, gives offense...
...that it doesn't try. Scenes are lifted from the book, hung on the Hollywood sets, trimmed in language, and left to dry. Example: Benjamin and the Monkey (Karen Black), Portony's Gentile juicer brought to life, lie in bed after sex, and Benjamin virtually lists Portnoy's scatological memories. But nothing happens visually in the scene, except for Benjamin's lips moving in a glib monologue...
PERHAPS THE main reason why the narrative voice of Roth's Portnoy often worked so well is because Alex consciously impersonates familiar faces. Like Portnoy's mother, who laughed hysterically when he limitated characters from a radio show, we can see people we know filtered through the consciousness of a fellow sufferer. Lehman's version surveys the scene with as much distance from Alex as from anyone. Alex's guilty conscience has been excised, so that not only don't we see the others as Portnoy does, but we don't see alex either. Aside from Portnoy's voice-over...