Screen
O'Brien, Tom
Benefactors may not be as fascinating or as serious as Aunt Dan and Lemon, but it is an interesting play impressively performed. It is worth the price of admission to see Mary Beth Hurt moving...
...Her speech contains both the glory and vulnerability of a dreamer, especially an old one in a Sisyphean spot...
...Our most basic understandings of reality, Sacks says, are affected by this comparatively little known 9 area of the mind...
...Watson, do you make of that...
...A professor of clinical neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Sacks possesses the gifts of a speculative philosopher and the subtler, rarer skills of an old-fashioned doctor who was taught how to take a history...
...In these neurological transactions, the fight hemisphere differs fundamentally from the left...
...Maybe it's the difference between American and English acting, or Foote and Forster, but Page's melancholy outburst against fate seemed less hammy, less self-consciously important...
...Sacks has in store...
...If you like Americana, The Trip to Bountiful would be worth seeing for the sets alone, which vividly catch the late 1940s, when Coke, beauty shops, and sleek Greyhound buses were in full vogue...
...Extraordinary," comes the reply...
...Fortunately, it centers on Page's devoted quest for Bountiful, a once prosperous farm town on the Texas Gulf where the soil failed and which is not even reached by bus routes anymore...
...While some of us minister in ecclesial settings, most people minister in the marketplace...
...If the film has less drama than other recent" roots" movies, it approaches the look of the past more accurately, and better conveys its threadbare dignity...
...Along the way Foote also raises enough suspense about the old woman's fate--will she get there...
...The only false note in the film follows this escape: a bus fide in which Page opens up to a young woman (Rebecca de Mornay) who, in effect, becomes a daughter to her...
...the escape is a good example of light mock-heroic, as the older woman dodges her pursuers in a bus station...
...Box 4242, The College of St...
...Here I could not help recalling Peggy Ashcroft inA Passage to India...
...Foote lightens the tone by avoiding stereotypes and providing some comedy...
...Under Foote's direction, Page conveys a fine sureness of tone here, poised perfectly i i TENTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON LAY MINISTRY LA DECIMA CONFERENCIA NACIONAL SOBRE MINISTERIO LAICO Sponsored by THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR LAY MINISTRY Patrocinado por LA ASOCIACION NACIONAL PARA EL MINISTERIO LAICO JUNE 3-6, 1986 The College of St...
...Paul, Minnesota BIRTHING: DELIVERING THE MINISTER IN EVERY CHRISTIAN DAR LA LUZ: PARTEAR EL MINISTRO EN CADA CRISTIANO l l l l Sculpture by Paul Granlund A new church is being born in which more of God's people are becoming aware of their own unique call and gift of ministry...
...Small bits count for everything here, even the way Page keeps secretly admiring and then stealthily stuffing the check back into her baggy flower-print dress...
...The best scene in the film is not the conclusion of the quest, but a critical turning point...
...Catherine, St...
...28 March 1986:181between humorous gesture and genuine fear...
...In another case, Jimrnie, the forty-nine-year-old "ancient mafner,'" is caught in a time warp that would make Rod Serling proud...
...will her heart condition act up again?--to keep us involved despite the languid pace...
...Join us in St...
...The sense of what is real--as inexplicable as it is rudimentaryis apprehended in concrete, personal, and what Sacks calls iconic terms...
...And that's only the beginning...
...Paul, Minnesota, 55105, or call Kathy Northrop at {303) 988-2222...
...Catherine, St...
...A more realistic film might have profitably explored that sadness...
...One readily understands Page's determination to escape her neoGothic imprisonment, where she has to conceal her pension check to succeed at escape...
...GERALD WEALES Screen I I TITLE PAGE A TRIP TO REMEMBER T HE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL is short on plot, but long on character...
...Sacks is concerned with neurological impairments affecting the right hemisphere of the brain...
...And so it is with The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: a collection of singular cases, written in a singularly felicitous style...
...Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat may remind you of all those peculiar folks on your freshman year college hall, but as it turns out, things are not quite that bad...
...A singular case, Holmes...
...It contrasts perfectly with Jessie Mac's late forties', svelte, high-shouldered scarlet suit...
...In accomplishing this, Sacks displays a theoretical audacity not unlike Freud's and the moral perspicuity of a Robert Coles or George Orwell...
...Paun Baumann sense of character that made Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, another English physicianwriter with a profound regard for the spiritual properties of intelligence, a master storyteller...
...Sacks shares with the creator of Sherlock Holmes a fascination with what we might call cerebral mysteries...
...The case histories collected here concern Sacks's investigations into what he calls the neurology of self, and illuminate the nature of mental processes and the false certainties that beset our common notions of defective intelligence...
...In a woefully decrepit bus terminal, empty of all otl~er passengers, Page has to appeal to a sheriff (the admirably stolid Richard Bradford) not to stop her from trying to get the last few miles to Bountiful by herself...
...Heard is eager to please and puts up with his wife's bossiness, saving his filial tenderness for midnight hot milk...
...Their conversation covers too much ground, as Foote searches for more parallels between their emotional histories than necessary...
...On the left side the mental processes are abstract, conceptual, and schematic--what might be regarded as the higher functions...
...The film's surface isn't bountiful: it even echoes other recent Texas movies like Places in the Heart, using some of the same locations, and, at one point, the same central hymn, "Blessed Assurance...
...In fact, when Sacks introduces his patients and their fantastic problems, he all but turns to an invisible companion after each clinical description and says, "And what, Dr...
...The most painful scene in the early part of the film shows him allowing his wife to abuse his mother over a recipe...
...Of course the gentleman referred to in the title -- suffering from severe visual agnosia -- makes life around the house seem a little like a "Honeymooners" skit, with Ralph and Norton giving the girls a very hard time indeed...
...Nevertheless, it attains individuality because of the strong central performance, and the pathos it achieves at portraying old age and its search for roots...
...Paul to acknowledge the pain, celebrate the life and nurture the growth of the emerging church...
...All of us struggle to identify our call...
...Jessie Mac is genuinely concerned when she fears her mother-in-law is having a heart attack...
...Page (who has received her eighth Oscar nomination for her performance) plays Carrie Watts, living in tight quarters in Houston in the late 1940s with her son (John Heard) and spoiled, termagantish daughter-in-law Jessie Mac (Carlin Glynn...
...where has that pension check gone...
...Conference speakers will be Dolores Leckey, Leonard Doohan, Emilie Griffin, Dick Westley, Rosemary Haughton, and Elizabeth Dreyer, as well as outstanding professionals who minister in the marketplace...
...People find strange legs -- their own, usually -in their beds," while others suffer from olfactoD= overload or the paradoxical effects of neurosyphilis's return in old age...
...For more information regarding the association and a brochure on the conference, write: The Pastoral Ministry Program, P.O...
...He knows a good story when he treats one, and propounds a conundrum with the same vigor of expression, eye for detail, and vivid TilE NAN WHO lSTNIr Nit WIFE FOR A HAT, AND OTHER CLINICAL TALES Oliver Sacks Summit llmlits, $15.95, 233 pp...
...In other words, the eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, what the good Dr...
...It is worth the price of admission to see Mary Beth Hurt moving her proper, humble Sheila crabwise into the lives of David and Jane...
...At the end, however, more needs to be said about how few elderly get to live out the dream of going home one more time...
...The story simply involves an old Texas woman (Geraldine Page) desperate to see her old farm before she dies...
...Page wants to go home (to an old run-down farm) one more time before she dies, and thereby hangs the tale...
...TOM O'BRIEN Books: CEREBRAL MYSTERIES I II I I A T FIRST glance the neurological casualties in Dr...
...But the Commonweal: 182...
...Directed by Horton Foote, The Trip to Bountiful succeeds where his painfully understated study of Texas, 1918, failed: finding human wealth in meager settings...
Vol. 113 • March 1986 • No. 6
