Word: righteous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...devotion. Therese was a vibrant teenager, bursting with the juice of sanctity, and in Christ she found the ideal outlet for her holy passion. She reveled in his ascetic good looks, his impossible demands, his gentlemanly reticence. For Therese, God was the perfect man -- an amalgam of loving husband, righteous father, adorable son, good-time pal, indefatigable lover -- and she made herself the ultimate acolyte, surrendering to her heart's crush. Throwing over reverence for schoolgirl rapture, Therese dared to love Jesus to pieces...
Unfortunately, The Mosquito Coast (based on Paul Theroux's 1982 novel) is not a postcard. It is a movie, recording in painful detail the self-righteous Allie's trek toward a predictable tragedy, herding his long-suffering family before him as he goes. And though Harrison Ford offers a hypnotizing portrayal of a man covering despair with lunatic optimism, hysteria with bravado and rigid self-control, a fatal prejudice lingers in the audience: we do not want to spend a couple of hours with Allie here any more than we would if he were, heaven forfend, our next-door neighbor...
...unpersuasive piety by Jeremy Irons. Most interesting among them is Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert De Niro), whose spiritual progress gives the movie such modest narrative force and particularized human interest as it has. Discovered doing a little free-lance slaving, Mendoza soon kills his brother in a quarrel, succumbs to righteous guilt and then struggles to atone. To abase himself while scaling the side of the falls as the good father's newest acolyte, Mendoza insists on toting a heavyweight bag of arms, armor and other accoutrements of civilization. This junk boldly symbolizes the burden of his sins, and watching Mendoza...
...kind of evil incantation, bewitching susceptible kids and threatening society's sense of order and security. The public is outraged; opinion polls show that drug abuse has surpassed economic woes and the threat of real war as the nation's No. 1 concern. For a nation whose penchant for righteous crusades can surpass even its tolerance for libertine individualism, the crackdown against crack has become the latest celebrated cause...
JoBeth Williams delivers a convincing performance as Rose's mother who tries to see only the best in people and ignore the animosity between her husband and daughter. After Williams discovers that her beautiful sister, Star, has engaged in some drunken flirtation with Voight, she flies into a righteous rage that is a wonder to watch. Somehow, beneath all the creampuffiness of her performance, Williams convinces us that Rose's mother has the spunk her daughter doesn...