Word: vera
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...stopped lying there moaning and suffering," Potter observes, "ready to deal with the world as a detective would -- tough-minded and able to manipulate it." In the pain- streaked world of Dennis Potter, that counts as a happy ending: hero cured, beautiful woman on his arm, and Vera Lynn warbling We'll Meet Again in the tuppenny jukebox of his soul...
Landau aside, no one else in the cast gets a similar opportunity to assert any complexity; Joan Allen as Tucker's wife Vera particularly suffers in this regard. But that is a small defect in a movie of large virtue. Preston Tucker failed to attain what we are pleased to think of as the American Dream of success: his factory produced only a few dozen cars before it closed. But there is another more common, more potent American Dream, which involves not the invention of products but the invention of self. And this movie, genial and fierce, is proof...
Disgusted with Chilean politics, Torre and Vera resolve to go to France to be together for the rest of their lives. Vera, however, realizes he cannot deny his roots, and he travels south to find his father. For her part, Torre finds she is not strong enough to abandon her life-long work as an activist to take care of Vera's child and Lopito's ugly little girl. Resolving to work again for freedom in her country, she leaps out of Vera's car and consequently throws potential love and happiness out of her life...
...climax of the novel occurs at the actual funeral of Matilde Neruda. Thousands of communists, Leftists and friends converge on the local cemetery to protest and to show respect for the dead, including the perennial drunkard Juan Lopez, or Lopito, as he is known to his friends including Vera and Torre. Angered by a policeman's laughter at his incredibly ugly and clumsy daughter, Lopito picks a fight with the machine gun man and is put in jail without bail...
...Vera and Torre attempt to secure Lopito's release, but they realize only too late that they are helpless in the government's insidious tangle of lies and deception. Although he is too weak to move, the police force Lopito to push a heavy cement roller across a basketball court, but he collapses and dies. Torre witnesses the entire scene, but even though she calls in her cousin, who is Freddy Fox, she and Vera are too late. Even Fox is powerless in the face of the cackling doctor, who signs Lopito's death certificate saying he died...