Word: sloper
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Take, for example, Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance as Catherine Sloper, the shy and awkward young woman whose wealth Townsend is stalking. Does she really have to keep dropping objects and walking into walls to prove her social and physical ineptitude? And what about Albert Finney as her father, at once contemptuous and overprotective of her? He's a constantly rumbling volcano ever on the verge of eruption. One keeps recalling, much to Finney's disadvantage, the icier malevolence of Ralph Richardson in the earlier movie. On the other hand, Maggie Smith's Aunt Penny, more in love with Morris...
Which, of course, she does, but Catherine doesn't question his motives. She wagers all she has on the purity of Morris's love, while Morris himself begins a protracted, ugly rivalry with the skeptical Dr. Sloper. As Morris tells Catherine, "I stake my pride on proving to your father that he is wrong," failing to realize that his intended declaration of love has become a declaration...
...part, Dr. Sloper whisks Catherine off to Europe, primarily to distance Catherine from Morris, but also in pathetic pursuit of Morris's globe-trotting, foreign-bred charm. The tragedy of Washington Square is that, by the end of the film, the only shadow of love that survives is the jealous, passionate admiration that exists between Morris and the doctor. Catherine has been erased from her own romance...
...incongruities between her persona and the period, however, serve to reinforce the essential awkwardness Catherine Sloper feels in her own environment. The skittish, chameleon-like quality that has kept Leigh from being a star is perfectly suited to Catherine. She almost disappears inside her own scenes until her misery and confusion are quietly compelling and almost uncomfortable to behold...
Washington Square centers around Catherine Sloper, a young woman whose individual identity is constantly undermined by her relations to the men around her. Her father sees in Catherine the ghost of his wife, who died in childbirth, and thus continually perceives her as a disappointment, a symbol of his own loss. "At the beginning of the film," says Holland, "Catherine seems 'stupid' because the father and the aunt see her that...