Word: waterstone
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...This isn't a 1940s movie," Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) cries in one of the less deadly moments of frustration he suffers in The Killing Fields. One has to admire the honesty of a film that includes among its other acuities an intelligent capsule review of itself. For in recounting the tormented friendship of Schanberg, the New York Times correspondent who won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for his accounts of the fall of Cambodia, and his native assistant, Dith Pran (Haing S. Ngor), the film does sacrifice the narrative coherence and the heroically moral resolutions old movies imposed...
...central character is a cancer researcher (Sam Waterston) who has superficially mastered all he surveys in the adult world but who remains fixated on the griefs of his childhood. The set is a blasted-heath garden in which the fretful doctor's boyhood playthings-including building blocks that spell out his name-have been mortared into the walls, ostensibly by his long-dead mother. He ruefully explains: "It was her way of teaching me not to leave my toys outside." The audience for the premiere production, at Harvard University's American Repertory Theater, soon realizes that this remark...
...life is actually as empty as it feels." Moreover, the equivocal closing scenes of reconciliation between the doctor and his father seem anticlimactic after the keenly perceived torments of his marriage. Somerville and Scheller ably play the wife and son, and Cronyn invigorates the ill-defined minister, but Waterston starts at so shrill and petulant a pitch that he has nowhere to go. In the big scenes, he flounders like a gaffed fish...
...Waterston's performance as Sam Carter further exacerbates the problems inherent in creating this character. For the first half of the play, he is a big baby, throwing temper tantrums and quarrelling with his wife and father in front of his young son. Later, when we learn the reason for his aberrant behavior, the excuse seems insufficient. Waterston remains on one level throughout his portrayal of this man who has clearly reached the end of his rope: his rope: his strained hysterics rarely vary...
...known on campus. They worshiped their mentor, imitated him and worked endless hours with him exploring the new frontier of atomic physics. One of the significant accomplishments of the series is that it conveys to nonscientists the elusive quality of scientific passion. And one of the accomplishments of Sam Waterston, who plays the lead, is that he captures not only Oppenheimer's arrogance but his mesmerizing appeal...