Word: righteousness
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Platoon pushes the metaphor further, thousands of miles away from the "world," into the combat zones of Nam. Platoon says that American soldiers -- the young men we sent there to do our righteous dirty work -- turned their frustrations toward fratricide. In Viet Nam, Stone suggests, G.I.s re-created the world back home, with its antagonisms of race, region and class. Finding no clear and honorable path to victory in the booby-trapped underbrush, some grunts focused their gunsights on their comrades. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army (NVA) were shadowy figures in this family tragedy; stage center...
...planets: "Do you believe in equal justice?" "I don't believe in equal nothin'!" The narration by Julian Bond is admirably restrained, and - those interviewed (from such movement leaders as John Lewis and Stokely Carmichael to old foes like Alabama Sheriff Jim Clark) look back without sounding either self-righteous or defensive. Except for its evocative use of spirituals and protest songs as a backdrop, the documentary refuses to embellish a story already brimming with drama...
...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...