Screen

...The Fever's fever is societally induced anguish...

...It selects...

...The next fifteen minutes of the film show the result of his decision to die rather than suffer amputation: his suicidal charge into enemy fire not only fails to bring about his death but saves his limbs and wins him military glory...

...Wonderfully effective TV actors, like James Gamer, David Janssen, and Tom Selleck, have consistently failed to carry their special power over from the small to the large screen, and this cannotbe blamed on "bad scripts...

...The two characters who embody these concerns are Paul and Ouisa, the art dealer's wife, the only ones who escape stereotype and provide opportunities for the best performances in the production--those of Courtney B. Vance and Stockard Channing...

...it is metaphysical...

...The courage that brought him medals was born of suicidal desperation...

...In this, his directorial debut, Costner establishes himself as a master of cinematic composition and movement and as a sympathetic director of actors...

...All the elements I have praised help portray the panorama that forms around John Dunbar, but who is he...

...Of the few who have made the crossover--Clint Eastwood, say, and Sally Field--it has to be said that the films they make are largely, and cleverly, tailored to the distinctive one-dimensionality they first carved out on the Tube...

...What makes the line so funny is not just that it invokes the old--and by now largely pointless--snobbism of"the thaytah" about the movies, but that it does so in the context of TV: because if there is any dramatic medium that seems to render the concept of acting as an art almost completely irrelevant, surely it is the Tube...

...GERALD WEALES SCREEN A FILMMAKI R'S INSTINCTS COSTNER'S 'DANCES WITH WOLVES' he very first shot of Dances with Wolves announces what the rest of the film confu'ms: Kevin Cosmer has a filmmaker's eye...

...The remaining two hours and forty-five minutes of Dances with Wolves show the consequence of a different brand of courage: during his one-man occupation of a far-flung western outpost in Sioux territory soon after the war, Costner's decision to fight on behalf of the natives leads him to reject the goals of his government and his caste...

...A grunt, a moan, a rustling as the patient raises himself...

...Brief silence...

...Costner looks at the surgical instruments laid out and guesses what is in store for him...

...Costner is clearly infatuated with Dunbar and this bias disfigures aspects of his movie...

...Two pairs of hands are examining the bloody damage...

...They are seen neither as aboriginal devils nor as nature's nobility but simply as people...

...s it happens, while Guare's animated carloons were moving their successful show from the small to the large theater at Lincoln Center, Shawn was touching another aspect of the lives of comfortable New Yorkers in The Fever, a monologue that played briefly at the Public Theater...

...That's the wonderful line croaked by Peter O'Toole's character in My Favorite Year, when he discovers that the skit he is supposed to perform on an early fifties TV show is going to be done live, and instantly seen in millions of homes...

...One review that I read suggested that The Fever is a dated Marxist critique, but the reviewer simplified in a way that Shawn, who has one of the most fascinating minds in contemporary American drama, never could...

...In TV, as Robert Frost earlier observed of walls, something there is that does not like an actor...

...RICHARD ALLEVA MEDIA THE TRIALS OF TV ACTING THE TRIUMPH OF SHARON GLESS 6 ~ 'm not an a c t o r - - I ' m a movie star...

...That finely discriminatory visual sense that decided to render the surgical hands synecdochic rather than turn the doctors into conventionally photographed bit players, that reserved the first close-up of the movie for the hero who will appear in nearly every subsequent scene, that established his fear of amputation 18: Commonweal with a shot of fly-attracting instruments, operates in high gear throughout the film...

...Between bouts of vomiting, he recalls, lovingly, his protected childhood, bemoans his affluence in the face of the world's poor, defends that affluence (sounding like Aunt Dan), and imagines retribution for the life he leads...

...the courage born of compassion and premeditation makes him a traitor...

...The pointof-view is from the opposite end of the table where the patient's unseen head rests...

...Between the victim's feet, we can see in the distance a group of Union soldiers at rest...

...But what past life...

...But later, after Dunbar aligns himself with the natives, the army men are portrayed (with one nebulous exception) as uniformly bigoted and bestial...

...That first shot, a lengthy one, is of wounded legs at one end of an operating table...

...And as for all those spunky, naive but goodhearted gals (sure the word is sexist--so are the movies) portrayed by Field, come on: Sister Bertrille in jeans is still Sister Bertrille...

...Mary McDonnell as a white woman brought up by the Sioux is too conscious of the great bone structure in her lovely Irish face, and darts and drops her eyes to the point of coyness...

...At some point, Ouisa explains that she has read that everyone is connected with everyone else in the world with only six persons between you and whomever...

...Nothing of Dunbar's background is alluded to on screen, and Costner's performance--the weakest one in the movie~oesn't fill the lacunas in Michael Blake's script...

...My concerns are about the imagination and how we live in this city," Guare told the New York Times (June 10, 1990...

...And Costner's decision to use subtitles under the Sioux dialogue allows us to register inflections, stumblings, sarcasms that we otherwise would miss...

...But she captures perfectly the effort to speak English after thirty years of not hearing, speaking, or thinking it...

...The trick is to discover the six...

...Let's admit it...

...Guare's theme is a solid one, but the play is as light as its mannerisms...

...Costner's effort suffers from problematic elements that the creators of Stallion and Man, with their more straightforward subjects, never had to deal with, and that David Lean, in Lawrence, nearly conquered...

...amiably attractive, it is finally as slickly trivial as most of its characters...

...Given a simple, straight-arrow role like Eliot Ness, Costner can use the reserve and quizzicality in his personality to color and slightly deepen the part...

...However, as a film dramatist, he needs to stop playing favorites...

...When Paul calls Ouisa at the end, he may still be playing his lying games, but the desperation in his voice reaches her...

...It dramatizes...

...There is no cure in The Fever...

...The conceit gives Guare his title, but ifI am going to play connection games, I prefer the network of interconnected minds that Wallace Shawn proffers in "On the Context of the Play," the essay accompanying the Grove Press edition of Aunt Dan and Lemon...

...It will return to New York in the spring, after Shawn has performed it in England for a few months...

...But don't let any of my reservations keep you from seeing Dances with Wolves...

...His fever is not physical...

...If you check out any of the TV nostalgia or trivia-quiz books that seem to be always flooding the market, you notice something curious...

...But, like directors Huston, Lean, and Carroll Ballard, Costner never tosses action and special effects in the viewer's face but always searches for the excitement inherent in each scene...

...His presentation assumes that the audience shares his background and his anxiety...

...If the sequence has any purpose in the play (Guare's admirers love him for the absurdist jumps in his work), it is to indicate that Paul's charm and his lies can be fatal as well as funny...

...There are occasional humorous lines and images and changes of voice (indicating sides of his character) to break the even flow of the monologue, but it is a demanding work passing itself off as a comfortable conversation...

...The two surgeons go off for their coffee...

...Unlike the characters in Six Degrees, he has the imagination to see people more clearly than his upbringing taught him he should...

...The persona in The Fever, a character very like Wallace Shawn (and not simply because he is performing it), is in a "poor country where they do not speak my language," suffering from the titular fever...

...We haven't once glimpsed their faces...

...The production consists of Shawn's sitting onstage alone and talking for almost two hours...

...I think that the demonizations of both whites and Pawnees in this movie stem not from liberal guilttripping but from leading-actor egomania...

...two voices agree that gangrene hasn't set in yet, that an operation is in order, but that a few reviving cups of coffee must be downed by the exhausted doctors before any cutting takes place...

...There is only the disease, the portrait of a man trapped by perceptions that pull him deeper and deeper into a disaffection with his own life while he tries desperately to hold on to the perquisites of his position...

...Love me, love my sidekicks...

...Well, no...

...She attempts and fails to save him, but what she is trying to save is the perception, planted by him, of the hole at the center of their lives...

...It makes Dances with Wolves one of the finest adventure movies of recent years, not unworthy of Lawrence of Arabia, The Black Stallion, and The Man Who Would Be King...

...Costner has cast good actors and elicited good work from them as well...

...Did the Sioux never show aggression or cruelty toward their neighbors...

...In the opening scenes, with Dunbar a loyal soldier in the Union army, the other soldiers are portrayed as decent chaps (a fatherly general, lots of boys in blue cheering Dunbar's suicidal charge...

...Dirty Harry and all of Clint's other avatars are all first cousins of the tightlipped, whispering Rowdy Yates of"Rawhide...

...Why, when the Pawnees kill, do their victims die in agony (with the Pawnees scalping them before they expire), while the Sioux always kill quickly, cleanly, and in self-defense...

...Yet, that is not where the seriousness in Six Degrees lies...

...The veristic, restrained acting plus the subtitles bring us closer to these Sioux than we have ever been to movie Native Americans...

...The faces with instant recognition-quotient, the faces by which we mark our fifty-year love affair with the Tube, are generally not the faces of actors at all, but the faces llJanuary1991:19...

...It rejects...

...Channing does a fine transition here, turning the ditzy dame of most of the play into a woman with the imagination to feel pain and distress...

...So Dances with Wolves is a masterpiece, right...

...But he never makes the vaguely written Dunbar more than a well-meaning, somewhat shambling fellow with limp blond hair...

...After helping his Sioux comrades win a battle, Dunbar states that only the new tribal name they have honored him with, "Dances-with-Wolves," has any meaning for him, and that his white man's name is just a hollow sound, thereby telling us that his past life lacked substance...

...First cut in the film: Reverse angle on the patient's face, Kevin Costner playing John Dunbar...

...It may not be a masterpiece but, playing in the same multiplex theaters with Rocky V and Predator H, it seems like a miracle...

...The Native American actors are superb---Rodney Grant, Graham Greene, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Tantoo Cardinal, Doris Leader Charge...

...Vance's tour de force is Paul's analysis of The Catcher in the Rye as a protest against the loss of imagination in our society--a presentation that is itself an act of imagination...

...I grant that the Union cause was nobler than the removal of the native tribes, but Costner's bias toward whoever fights alongside Dunbar leads him to caricature Indians as well as white men, namely the Pawnee, enemies of the Sioux...

...I'm not disputing the naturalness of Dunbar's decision to fight against the enemies of the people he has lived with, but Costner virtually dehumanizes the Pawnees...

...True, the Pawnee battle garb and hairdress lend themselves to an impression of fierceness, but why does Costner photograph the warriors against blood-red skies and underscore their movements with ominous music...

...It is never going to reach the large audience that has made Six Degrees of Separation a hit, but I was happier--which is to say, more uncomfortable--with Shawn than with Guare...

...It is his inability to keep those others, those accusers, at bay...