Word: spacek
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...trappings of a media circus. Sissy Spacek showed up at a Beverly Hills, California, press conference urging health-conscious Americans to "start screaming at Congress and the White House." Mariel Hemingway spoke her mind to the New York Times on the issue of pill dosages and potency. Whoopi Goldberg, Randy Travis, Laura Dern and friends sent a videotape to Washington that included a shot of Mel Gibson being dragged from his home in handcuffs, saying "Gee guys, they were only vitamins!" A BATTLE ROYAL JELLY, proclaimed one headline writer. THE FDA'S WAR OF THE ROSE HIPS, wrote another...
Theater-trained, he quickly found a niche in films and TV. He could play thugs with dumb cunning, in Jackson County Jail and as Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song, or frog consorts to movie divas (Faye Dunaway in Eyes of Laura Mars, Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter, Kathleen Turner in the recent House of Cards). He approached both avant-garde stage work (Ulysses in Nighttown, Sam Shepard's True West) and high movie schlock (The Betsy, Rolling Thunder) with energy and respect. "It's no mean calling," he says, "to bring fun into the afternoons...
...Garrison's wife, the character played by Sissy Spacek, simplified in the film...
...research into Oswald's character. "We all became assassination buffs. Marina ((Oswald's Russian-born widow)) had a tape that she let me see. It had a section leading up to the line, 'I'm just a patsy.' Oliver saw it, and he said, 'Let's restage that scene.' " Spacek spent time with Garrison's ex-wife Liz. "The sense I got from her," the actress says, "is of a woman living the life she wanted to live until her husband's obsession came through. She was proud of Jim, but his obsession went...
Goldberg and Spacek perform their good deeds without undue condescension, and Dwight Schultz is really fine as Spacek's husband, teetering between propriety and principle. But no actor's art can disguise the simplemindedness of this tract or the stodginess with which it is dramatized. What are audiences to learn about today's racial antagonisms from a long-ago tug of war between saints (the black underclass) and demons (the Alabama plutocracy)? The movie plays like a Christmas card whose sentiment is noble but whose poetry is doggerel...