Word: wiesting
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...having learned that skillfully shunning publicity actually produces more of it. But the writer-director last week was willing to talk, a little, about his next film, Hannah and Her Sisters, in which he stars with his longtime love, Mia Farrow, 40, as Hannah and Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest as the sisters. The plot is still Allen's deep secret, but he admits to having a continuing fascination with Farrows. "For years, Mia's family has been lucky for me," he said. "One of her sisters (Tisa) was in Manhattan, another of her sisters (Stephanie) was in The Purple...
...playing the kind of man who sins only so he can suffer. By the second act, however, when Quentin is mud wrestling with Maggie's demons and making them his own, Langella has captured the character's soul; he is stooped, obsessive, spent. As Maggie, Dianne Wiest is an inspired piece of miscasting...
Luminous earlier this year in Serenading Louie and Other Places, Wiest is still no sexpot, no Marilyn; truth to tell, Langella is prettier than she is. More over, she affects a wispy giggle that mimics Monroe and every little girl lost from Susan Alexander Kane to Judy Garland. Yet Wiest has managed to bleach the intelligence out of her face, leaving only a cunning child with the look of a battered seraph. This is no flesh-and-blood performance; it is pure, chilling marrow. Emotional striptease is what such acting is all about. But perhaps not play writing...
...driver (Kevin Conway). One for the Road, set in an unidentified police state, offers the horrific spectacle of the torturer as business executive, bantering with his victims as he sends them off to be flogged, raped or killed. In A Kind of Alaska, a middle-aged woman (Dianne Wiest) awakes from a 29-year siege of sleeping sickness to confront a reality at pathetic odds with her memories and hallucinations. Dispatcher, torture victim, woman, all struggle valiantly to understand a new world of menacing mystery...
...Alaska Pinter has taken a TV-movie disease-of-the-week subject and alchemized it into a searing, sympathetic portrait of a lost soul who must seek solace in the dreams and embarrassments of an idyllic girlhood. Wiest's performance is an astonishment. Every word she speaks rings with both a child's self-possession and a flinty woman's solitude; each step she takes is as shaky as an inebriate's on a tightrope in a high wind. And Pinter, by daring to be accessible, has fashioned a small miracle of a play...