Word: psychodramas
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Though Platoon is a breakthrough, it is not a breakaway. The film is traditional enough to connect with a mass audience. In its story line it holds echoes of Attack!, Robert Aldrich's 1956 psychodrama, in which a World War II infantry company is torn by a mortal struggle between two officers -- one messianic, the other deranged -- while a young man's loyalty hangs in the balance. Platoon's narration, in the form of Chris' letters to his grandmother, is often as stilted and redundant as silent-movie title cards. When a naive new boy shows Chris a photo...
Screenwriter-Director Leon Marr (adapting a novel by Joan Barfoot) is a neat freak with images. Every shot is composed precisely enough to win Edna's approval. The cool, creepy, witty splendor of this Canadian psychodrama is that it resides simultaneously inside and outside Edna's pristine, pathetic mindscape, from her daft rapture over the perfectly made bed to the moment when she hears of her husband's infidelity and tears and saliva cascade down her face. Dancing in the Dark dares to be misunderstood as a case history; in fact, it is Heartburn with a haunting irregular heartbeat...
...rich (in their preppy Miami Vice linens) already know how to use the tyranny of style to ostracize poor Andie and Duckie (in their junk-punk-funk handmades), at base the picture is Love Finds Andie Walsh. And when Stanton must play a Judge Hardy on the skids, the psychodrama can get awfully wet. But within this familiar format, Hughes creates edge, surprise and romance. Blane and Andie's first chat, conducted on their school computer terminals, is a lovely '80s twist on meeting cute. Blane's snooty friend Steff (James Spader) could be a tired stereotype, but with...
...this profoundity leads to a little bit of overacting on everyone's part. Fonda expressing her love for Agnes and her wish to help has all the old cornyness of the Three Faces of Eve psychodrama. But the actresses are all of high caliber, so the sound and fury is controlled and realistic...
...homestead into a Freudian minefield. Here Jeremy is less the middle class's guilty secret than, in his sister's words, "a terminal jerk"; and Dad must expose himself as a paranoiac patriarch whose home is his castle, moated by ignorance. For the two hours preceding this pirouette into psychodrama, Home Front is fiercely sympathetic to all of its characters. Beneath Mom's lyrical ditsiness and Dad's clumsy evasions are two frightened people who care, beyond words, for their son. But because Jeremy's rage is beyond their comprehension, they can only stand by, then stand firm...