Word: soulfulness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cycles Schlesinger is brooding upon finally seem less a matter of liberal and conservative than the recurring struggle between pragmatism and idealism that knows no party label but takes place at the center of the American soul. The idealist's "excessive righteousness" combines with the Bomb to make Schlesinger reluctantly "apocalyptic," provoking him to his deepest moments. Nearly 25 years ago, he wrote that "history has always seemed to me primarily an art, a branch of literature." Today his neatly combed hair mussed, his bow tie askew, as it were, he writes with a new passion, as a vigorous elder...
They could be Eugene O'Neill's soul-wizened Tyrones, or an extended Chekhovian family chatting its way toward collapse, or the Ewings under sedation. And Tarkovsky is happy to display them in their dolors, at his pace, with all the spare majesty of his style. In the morning, Alexander celebrates his birthday by planting a tree with his son -- an ordinary bucolic tableau, captured in a ravishing shot that lasts almost ten minutes. That afternoon, when the daughter playfully balances a pear on the doctor's knee, it seems a daring bit of coquetry; nothing more need be revealed...
...cannot overcome the cliches of mistaken-identity comedy that were stylized when Plautus was a pup. Or enliven the film's sermon that even in enlightened environments like Harvard, racial stereotyping and unconscious prejudice still exist. The approach is too comfortable, the tone patronizing. The N.A.A.C.P. has greeted Soul Man with protests; one suspects it is not so much because the movie's heart is in the wrong place, but because its heart is a mechanical...
...Disney standards, but the characterizations, both visual and vocal, are entirely endearing. Since Director Bluth (The Secret of NIMH) is a Disney graduate who has been bluntly critical of his former studio's current standards and practices in this field, his mouse may have a subtext to match its soul...
Perhaps the toughest task before the new Senate majority will be speaking in a unified voice. There may be a skirmish for the soul of the party between the Kennedy-Cranston Old Guard and a neoliberal faction led by such Senators as Joe Biden of Delaware and Georgia's Sam Nunn. The Democrats have historically been a party of competing factions. Sometimes, as when Southern segregationists of old were filibustering the civil rights legislation of their Northern colleagues, there has been open warfare. The struggle this time around will be more subdued...