Word: subplots
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Michael Caine and Maggie Smith have never worked with each other be fore, but in the remaining subplot they make a perfect match. Smith gives her best screen performance ever in the role of a hard-drinking, hard-talking actress who arrives in Beverly Hills for Oscar night. Alternately buoyant and defeated, youthful and aging, she transforms a potentially campy character into a woman of great complexity and beauty. As her loving husband, an antiques dealer who prefers sex with men, Caine sets off Smith's brittle wit with soothing tenderness. Together these actors prove that a marriage...
...real problem with the Leverett production is at the same time one of its great strengths: Smith chooses to omit the entire comic subplot of the play written by collaborator William Rowley (without which the title is nearly meaningless). This leaves the play almost unbelievably short--the whole thing takes an hour-and-a-half, including a 15-minute intermission and scene changes. Along with the director's rapid-fire pacing of the scenes, this insures that The Changeling won't give audiences an overdose of post-Shakespearean blank verse--which most of the actors cope well with anyway...
Bereft of these comic scenes, the Leverett show was free to be a brief but potent spectacle of violent tragedy. Instead the performers seen to feel they have to make up for the comedy lost when the subplot was cut. In the process they dilute the effectiveness of the best melodramatic scenes...
...classes together, it never makes dramatic capital out of this crucial aspect of the music's social impact. Freed's susceptibility to payola, which ultimately proved his undoing, is mentioned only in passing and is then blithely excused. Kaye chooses to dwell instead on a tired subplot about a starry-eyed teen-age songwriter (Laraine Newman, of NBC's Saturday Night Live) who feuds with her disapproving folks...
...outline, the film has a predictable air about it, it should also be said that it isn't half bad. There is a crisp professionalism about David Greene's direction, and the writers have done without that bane of the disaster-picture formula, the subplot...