Word: waterstones
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...Yale production stressed the dichotomy between Old World awareness of the burdens of the past and New World faith in the perfectibility of man. This is downplayed by the Broadway cast. So is the Soviet's seductive charm in comparison with his American colleague's priggishness. Sam Waterston makes the U.S. delegate appealing even when he is obsessive. This gifted but erratic actor hits a career high with a scene in which he reveals the personal strain of feeling responsible for the fate of mankind. As the Soviet, Robert Prosky has most of the more poetic speeches, but he looks...
...quakingly vulnerable Lane (Mia Farrow). They include her mother (Elaine Stritch), a bruising emotional bully; her stepfather (Jack Warden), who is a noisy irrelevancy; a neighbor (Denholm Elliott) who expresses love by being socially obliging; a best friend (Dianne Wiest) who is obscurely tense; and Peter (Sam Waterston), the ad man who rented the guest cottage on the property and then failed in two obvious duties: he didn't finish the novel he intended to write there, and he didn't fall in love with his landlady...
...role of Peter is exceedingly well written, and Waterston reaches the heights of shiftiness at precisely those moments when he most openly proclaims his emotions. But all these people are relentlessly and statically articulate, especially when they are obscuring motives from themselves and one another. The humor of their humorlessness is often Chekhovian, and the flow of Allen's camera and cutting, together with the elegance of Cinematographer Carlo Di Palma's light, grants them a certain grace and dignity. But sometimes the members of this precious circle are too glibly elucidated; other times they are backed away from silently...
...American asshole journalist with a predilection for editorial moralizing. Schanberg is so narrow-mindedly hunting after a story that he cannot distinguish the larger picture from his dispatches, nor realize the consequences of his decision to stay. Anyone who has read Schanberg's column in the Times will find Waterston's interpretation convincing...
...reportorial manner from newspapering yarns. Brave, adversarial in his relations with the American mission supporting the Lon Nol government, unaware of how brutal the Khmer Rouge is, he is the classically impatient American journalist, overriding his better instincts in order to get the story. Those include, in Waterston's fine performance, the hint of a pervasive, unexamined melancholia that is far more common in life than it is in the movies. The picture leaves no doubt that if Schanberg had heeded the subtler side of his nature, his friend Pran would have been spared the almost inconceivable ordeal that...