Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lame same. An affluent high school senior has an affair with a hooker (Rebecca de Mornay), dunks the family Porsche in Lake Michigan, turns his house into a brothel and still gets into Princeton. Sounds like the Reagan era in miniature. But there was wit in Paul Brickman's script and swank in his camera style. For Cruise, there was more. As soon as he tore into an air-guitar rendition of Bob Seger's Old Time Rock 'n' Roll, in his Oxford-cloth shirt, B.V.D.s and socks, pop magnetism burst out of its suburban shell, and a star...
...script unfolds, it becomes clear that the characters in the detective plot are all based on the people around the writer at the studio -- indeed, the same actors play both sets of roles. This connection leads to countless comic effects. In the splashiest, the perennially disappointed "other woman" (Randy Graff) of both plot lines switches characters, costumes and locales in mid-song, all without missing a beat of her ferociously funny lament, You Can Always Count...
...time and settling down the second time into a perverse sort of domestic bliss. Markham's good-ole-boy world view is distasteful: women are treated as property, and both defeats of the devil depend on the notion that homosexuality is a fate worse than damnation. But Silverstein's script, told in verse with occasional bursts of music, is rowdy and rousing and raunchily uproarious, especially in a song about a gala party where saints and sinners mingle ("Richard III is comparing his hump with Quasimodo's"). The sole performer, as both Markham and his demonic adversary, is Dennis Locorriere...
...cannot speak too highly of the subtlety that two great actors, Freeman and Tandy, bring to their roles. Or of the faith that Beresford places in their ability to convey large emotions through an exchange of glances in a rearview mirror. Or of his trust in a script that speaks most eloquently through silences and indirection. All, finally, have placed their faith in the audience's ability to read their delicately stated work with the responsiveness it deserves. It would be a shame to fail them...
Kevin Jarre's script makes no direct comment on these matters, and a squad of fine actors ground the film in felt reality: Denzel Washington is a proud and badly misused troublemaker; Driving Miss Daisy's Morgan Freeman a steadying influence; Andre Braugher a Harvard student who finds Emersonian idealism of small help in mastering the bayonet. It is the movie's often awesome imagery and a bravely soaring choral score by James Horner that transfigure the reality, granting it the status of necessary myth. Broad, bold, blunt, Glory is everything that a film like Miss Daisy, all nuance...