Word: wasp
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Generally, the actors survive their director. Donald Sutherland presents the essence of the WASP lawyer, a martini with legs, without becoming a cartoon; Timothy Hutton is impressive throughout, although distanced somewhat by his technique, and reminiscent in his mannerisms, of James Dean. When the actors do lapse, though, they look like they're auditioning for a Method class in the Village, and this can probably be chalked up to Redford...
...People, and her name is Mary Tyler Moore. Here, in the mother, we are supposed to find the motive force behind all the problems of the son and father, and, by extension, everybody. Moore (Tyler Moore?) does nothing with it. She's not allowed to show any emotions--cold WASP bitch--but she doesn't even evince any humanity. So she drifts through the movie like a white zombie. When her big scene comes at the end (Sutherland has just told her he no longer loves her), she is not so much an emotionally overwrought woman as a dead ringer...
...dozen tame, regional variations on then popular French artists like Bastien-Lepage or Tissot, whose work provided a palatable substitute for the analytic modernity represented by impressionism at its best. Hence the Boston show is heavily freighted with affable but basically in sipid dining-room pictures of young Wasp rosebuds swathed in yards of white voile, clustered on lawns, playing on beaches, posing on verandas or picking flowers. They make one realize how badly America needed modern art. Not until the ad vent of some of the impressionist-influenced painters of "the Eight"-say, Maurice Prendergast after 1900, with...
This play is a tone poem, and it is surely Robin Phillips at the top form of his directorial career who has elicited from Maggie Smith this confluence of naked emotions. She is, from moment to moment, grieving, loving, bitter, wasp-witted, rapturous, valiant and a wombful of fear. Her most powerfully affecting sequence is the descent into madness, where terrifying apparitions of unreason flit like vampire bats through the buckling rafters of her brain...
...scattered vision of America, full of fascinating minutiae and human detail, but lacking leadership, direction, plan or vision. "Surely," says Carl Degler, "the American people are more than a collection of diverse nationalities, classes and genders living between Canada and Mexico. We are right to have tossed aside the Wasp-centered idea of history, but we haven't created yet a new, equally holistic conception of history to replace...