Word: tom
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and screenwriter Tom Stoppard have made an interesting attempt to put Vladimir Nabokov's novel Despair on film. Anyone who has read the book might think that reconceiving the story in cinematic terms would be impossible--the tale relies on the reader's acceptance or disbelief of the first-person narrator's word. But Stoppard's conception is genius; only the delivery falls short of the mark...
...Tom Stoppard loves playing around with dramatic from: the characters in his plays see themselves as figuratively or literally on a stage. Fassbinder displays a similar interest in form, and a feeling for intricate vision detail to match Stoppard's verbal relish. Match this pair with Nabokov, with his witty, self-conscious prose and playful pokes at literary form and point-of-view, and you have a threesome so finely tuned that they practically exclude the rest of us. Add Dirk Bogarde, one of Britain's most mannered, fastidious actors, and it's no surprise Despair is impenetrable...
Dave Otto, Tom Temple, Matt Sabetti, Craig Beling, Bob Murray, Tom McDevitt and Fred Cordove (among others) are still ailing on the defense, while center Dave Scheper and halfback Paul Connors are hurting on offense...
Fortunately for the Crimson, some depth has shown up at the running back spot with Jon Hollingsworth showing lots of promise at Princeton (9 carries, 55 yards), and Tom Beatrice and Chuck Sandor showing back-up potential...
...Natalie endures two deaths in the family and Tom tries to come to terms with his wife's infidelities, their affair frays and then severs. Though the doomed lovers are portrayed with grace and wit, the novel's style is curiously oblique, conveying intensity of feeling not so much by exposition as by choice of detail and inflection...