Word: smithson
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...great forwards returning in Cliff Levingston and Antoine Carr. They have added two of last year's most highly recruited schoolboy prospects in 7-ft. 1-in, center Greg Dreiling and 6-ft. 4-in. back-court man Aubrey Sherrod. But none of this will matter because coach Gene Smithson and his team will be on probation and ineligible for post-season play by the time the NCAA tournament rolls around anyway...
Pinter lays suitably simple stagings across this background--frameworks for passion and its absence that play off one another. Most attention falls on the Victorian drama, in which Christopher Irons plays an aristocratic dabbler at science, Charles Smithson, whose plans for marriage are torn apart by his vision of the haunting face of Meryl Streep at the end of a long sea wall, wind and waves crashing about her. Smithson spends the rest of the film trying to understand the reason for her remarkable, extraordinary look...
...flame is too bright to ignore. Streep's not-quite-pretty face, which should have been just the object of Smithson's passion, becomes instead the most memorable thing in the film. Streep, almost by accident, takes over the stage whenever she enters. Irons is good--his aristocratic gentility and his moments of anger both stand out clearly--but he can't compare to Streep's magic. Streep, as the Scarlet Woman of Lyme Regis, has to convey an obscure, flighty vulnerability, always looking away from the camera and Smithson. And always she has at her disposal that piercing stare...
...Sarah the actress comes into her own. Where Anna is predictably modern, Sarah has a hint of madness. The transformation between the two is captured in one of the film's best moments. Mike and Anna are wearing everyday clothes in their hotel room, rehearsing a scene in which Smithson comes upon Sarah with her skirt caught in a bush. They talk it through once--and then Streep does it, standing up and walking toward Irons. The costume doesn't matter: her eyes tell you that you are now watching Sarah. And just as you see the transformation in Streep...
...life-to-be outside the walls of the period story. The audience will learn soon and often enough: 14 times, the "present" film-within-the-film will give way to the "past" film-within-the-film-within-the-film. Inside the deepest box it is 1867, and Charles Smithson is again living out his perplexed obsession with the Scarlet Woman of Lyme...