Word: strathairn
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...seller to hit the big screen features Kathy Bates as a coarse-tongued yet endearing heroine who supports herself by caring for a rich invalid (Judy Parfitt) while mourning her estrangement from her deeply disturbed daughter (Jennifer Jason Leigh). The villain is Dolores' husband, a drunken wife beater (David Strathairn) who deserves the bad end she arranges for him in a tale complicated by its vagueness. "King boldly uses the most primitive and melodramatic forms to explore very basic emotional issues," says TIME critic Richard Schickel. "This is his fantasia on feminist themes...
...cast is uniformly able. Stockard Channing, as the self-denying British agent Elizabeth Hapgood, does all she can, with her crisp high-heeled pacing, to delimit the boundaries of her role, but there's something a little frustratingly soft -- in the text -- at her center. As played by David Strathairn, Kerner is more convincing as a scientist than as a squelched lover; there's something slightly too predictable -- too projectable, as Kerner the mathematician might say -- about his twitchings and jerkings when sentiment gets the better...
Gail teaches at a school for the deaf. She is a firm but good-humored mom. Her tolerance for the workaholic ways of her husband Tom (David Strathairn) is wearing thin, but she's laboring earnestly on the marriage. She is also an expert whitewater rafter, and has arranged a trip down a challenging, unnamed western river with Tom, their son Roarke (Joseph Mazzello) and the family dog (boy and dog are also estranged from Tom). The family that gets sprayed together stays together -- or so Gail hopes...
...like the good short-story writer he is, Sayles enjoys listening to people, picking up their quirks and cadences. These characters don't barge into Passion Fish, they just drop by. And they are worth the visit. The movie squirms to life when the subsidiary folk appear: Rennie (David Strathairn), the engaging "swamp Cajun" with the motor boat; Chantelle's beau Sugar (Vondie Curtis-Hall), whose pleasure in women is a contagious delight; Kim (Sheila Kelley) and Nina (Nancy Mette), two soap-opera actresses who give zest and drama to any line reading; May-Alice's gay, weary old friend...
...heads a marginal enterprise that does legalized breaking and entering designed to test corporate security systems. His associates include a defrocked cia operative (Sidney Poitier); a gentle paranoid (Dan Aykroyd) who believes the same group that killed Jack Kennedy also framed Pete Rose; a blind computer whiz (David Strathairn) whose keyboard -- and Playboy -- are in Braille; and a kid (River Phoenix) who demonstrated his personal best when he illegally improved his grades in a raid on his school's mainframe...