Word: wolffe
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...years earlier, his elder brother, Geoffrey Wolff, had published his own memoir, The Duke of Deception, a remarkable account of life with their father Arthur Wolff, a loving, brilliant rogue who was a lifelong bankrupt, scamster and confidence man. "A bad man and a good father," Geoffrey wrote after he floated free of the wreckage his father had created. Tobias recalls that he admired Geoffrey's book but that some of the characterizations seemed jarringly out of key. Then his own book came out. It told of their mother's cross-country flight with him, leaving Geoffrey behind with Arthur...
...interest in a memoir, especially a good one like Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, is voice-activated. It's not so much the tale as the teller, the tone he takes about himself, what he makes out of past experience, that seizes and holds our attention. It follows that an autobiography is not the ideal foundation for a movie; the two forms are antithetical. It also follows that This Boy's Life, though seriously meant and conscientiously made, doesn't quite work...
...profits. Toby must learn the manly art of self-defense, but mostly Dwight teaches him sucker punches and uses the lessons as an excuse to beat on the boy. De Niro's is a domineering performance, a star turn that is both comic and menacing, but it unbalances Wolff's story...
This is not De Niro's fault. The movie goes where movies must go: toward melodrama. And toward the current fashion (Jack the Bear, Radio Flyer) for taking up but not fully confronting child abuse. Something more subtle is going on in Wolff's book, a confrontation with a richer, quirkier past and his emerging self that the movie too often brushes aside...
There are lies and damned lies, and then there is memory. Writer Tobias Wolff reflects that "memory becomes an actor on its own. You try to make it tell the truth, and that's the best you can do." He is talking about his 1989 memoir, This Boy's Life, justly praised for the dead-on honesty of its scruffy boyhood self-portrait...