Word: shaffer
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...MINDS of many film critics and committed moviegoers, Sidney Lumet has been tried, convicted and sentenced. His offence against the entertainment world: wilfully tampering with Peter Shaffer's masterpiece Equus in Lumet's film adaptation of what may be the play of the '70s. Reviewers have pilloried Lumet for abandoning the example of the record-shattering Broadway production, and instead applying his personal imprint to the movie version. But such bad-mouthing has an unfair ring; if the director had retained the heavy-handed horse symbolism of the stage version, the critics' court probably would have found Lumet guilty...
...understanding the extraordinary success of Shaffer's work (he also is responsible for the film's screenplay) lies in the fundamental issues of existence raised by Dysart's mental meanderings. In his search to uncover the sources of Strang's obsession, Dysart observes that "a child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave." But the psychiatrist can only throw up his hands with an admission of resigned incomprehension: "Why those moments of experience are particularly magnified no one can say." From one perspective, the psychiatrist's reflections seem a recognition of the paradox...
Equus is an even more tedious movie than it had to be. Usually an energetic film maker, Director Lumet (Network) seems to have thrown up his hands on this one. He shoots Shaffer's original stage script as is, to the point of having characters address monologues directly to the camera. The play's gory climax-the blinding of six horses-is rendered realistically, not mimed as it was onstage. Rather than enhance Equus, Lumet's fidelity to the text accentuates every flaw...
Some of those defects pertain to structure and language, but Equus' main drawback is its philosophical thrust. Like so many other trendy writers, from R.D. Laing to Ken Kesey, Shaffer wonders whether madness may be a greater virtue than sanity in a sterile modern world. In Equus, madness is personified by Alan Strang (Peter Firth), a pretty, blond youth whose sexual desire for horses drives him to blind them; sanity takes the form of Dysart (Richard Burton), a repressed psychiatrist charged with curing Alan of his antisocial passion. In this confrontation between a virile equussexual and an impotent prune...
...there cannot-and that is why Shaffer stalls his inevitable denouement by padding the film's doctor-patient scenes with flashbacks that detail Alan's past. Despite a nude appearance by Jenny Agutter and cameo performances by such fine actors as Colin Blakely, Joan Plowright, Harry Andrews and Eileen Atkins, Equus' digressions are little more than excuses to fetch popcorn...