Screen
Alleva, Richard
There is a scene at the high table in which the conventional sympathy of his colleagues sets Jack off in an angry diatribe--the anger more apparent to me than the exact words were...
...Many pages are comic...
...It was perverse of me to sit in the Brooks Atkinson Theatre and wish that Shadowlands were The Gresham Story...
...Viewers who haven't read the books may assume that the interior lives of the Bridges are as fully conventional as their daily routines...
...as a parish priest accorded an audience with the pope...
...100: Commonweal Ironically, the carnival-loving Gresham was a magician, but his was stage magic, not the Narnia-style magic that Douglas wants...
...But Edward, maniacally snipping with his metallic digitals to turn suburban hedges into magnificent topiary, but later ripping the wallpaper of his benefactor's home because the daughter of the house can't return his love, is a poignant emblem of the artist whose gift is his curse, whose special skill both benfits ordinary people and arouses their suspicions...
...This scene is necessary to the movement of the play, but it is impossible to put on stage without sentimentality...
...Doubts about the play as play are complicated in my case by extratheatrical considerations...
...I think he underrates the kids...
...He is dismissed in a single sentence as an abusive alcoholic and a writer who does not write...
...The movie recovers beautifully in the last few minutes...
...This artificiality is underlined by the fact that all Jack's colleagues are caricatures (perhaps all English dons are, but they should not seem so on-stage) and by the play's origin as a television drama...
...Hawthorne's performance is wonderfully detailed in its donnish idiosyncrasy and Jane Alexander's Joy is an attractive figure of likable aggression, but my admiration for them as per- formers is never transformed into an acceptance of Jack and Joy as other than stage figures...
...Mind, not 'soul' as we tend to think of soul...
...Joy died in 1960...
...No more so than the ugly duckling...
...Bridge...
...But he repeatedly demonstrates his nifty way with actors, as in the moment when the rain-soaked Bridge holds his umbrella over his hysterical secretary as she stoops to retrieve her fallen purse while never pausing in her denunciation of his callousness...
...Burton flirted with the concept of Batman as a vigilante besotted with his own loneliness and prone to paranoia...
...while trying to communicate her grief over a suicide to her uncomprehending husband is immensely touching and brings the film to its emotional climax...
...Edward Scissorhands is, finally, a very sweet fairy tale...
...As soon as a playwright starts to deal with historical figures--particularly recent ones--I find myself worrying about what has been left out...
...In the middle of the woman's attempt at self-revelation, Bridge takes a moment to deal with the waiter...
...and Mrs...
...Gail Garnett, the actress who plays Mrs...
...He doesn't have to because he understands that Walter Bridge is one of those men who become more boyish (and more vulnerable) as they age, who snort like indignant adolescents when confronted by absur- dities, who look like crestfallen children when betrayed by their own children...
...Edward's rival in love is a punk who first taunts the mannequin, then lures him into crime, and finally tries to kill him...
...Yet Connell finally planted this image in my mind: a family seated around a campfire, them- selves encircled by darkness, the darkness alive with monsters, the wife and children alternately shaken and attracted by the howls of those monsters, and the father staring and smiling into the fire, steadfastly unheeding, determinedly deaf...
...I know he shortchanges himself...
...Near the end of Observed, Lewis describes a sense of Joy's presence: "Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own...
...Gresham...
...And, like any good fairy-tale teller, Burton draws everything to scale...
...Bridge and Mr...
...Gresham died in 1962, a suicide...
...James Ivory's direction is both fluent and layered, richly atmos- pheric yet unmannered...
...You can accept this figure up to a point as a version of the man of middle sensuality infuriated by the artist's strangeness...
...His office is both his batttlefield and his real habitat, with his home serving only as a sort of nightly bivouac...
...The event, completely free of the maudlin trappings of comforting presences, is the trigger that lets Lewis accept his grief...
...Bridge, the new Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward film has been titled, logically enough, Mr...
...Jhabvala repositions, elides, blends, adds, and telescopes with such skill that Mr...
...RICHARD ALLEVA 8 February 1991:101...
...Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's script for the movie is a triumph of selectivity and narrative cunning...
...dwardScissorhands reveals Tim Burton unchained ----except for a shackle or two the film director may have forged for himself...
...There is a scene at the high table in which the conventional sympathy of his colleagues sets Jack off in an angry diatribe--the anger more apparent to me than the exact words were audible--which seems to have come from A Grief Observed---God as "the Comic Sadist and Eternal Vivisector...
...Burton may be an artist but he is an artist determined that Edward won't be his last assign- ment...
...It is, of course, not Lewis but Nigel Hawthorne--the actor not the character--who cups the hand...
...By the time the Twentieth Century Authors statement appeared in 1955, Davidman must have been in England (she and Lewis were married in 1956), and the attractive man she describes has been transformed into an ugly impediment to the marriage of true minds...
...He knows just when to accentuate period detail and when to cut to the quick of an encounter...
...At one point in Shadowlands, Douglas asks Jack if he is a magician...
...Here Newman doesn't wear the phony paunch he used in his last few movies to disguise his unquenchable vigor...
...And not one of the family is able to tell any of the others about the sounds coming out of the darkness...
...This is true dramaturgical economy...
...If Edward is a toy-like reduction of the artist, then the suburbia that first embraces, then rejects him must also be toy- like...
...Lewis sits down next to an empty chair, reaches across to the arm ofit, and cups Joy's invisible hand...
...After a decade-and-a-half of annoyingly sere performances, Joanne Woodward blooms again, fully bringing out the sweetness and inadequacy of Mrs...
...Lewis, in 1963...
...All the conventions of the time, social and moral, are embraced by the Bridges, by him with a quiet, defensive ferocity, by her with a troubled con- viction that she must do as he does...
...But Newman has thickened his speech for the role, as if a lifetime of reticences had finally caught up with Mr...
...I cannot help feeling that Gresham is the victim of someone else's sleight of hand in Shadowlands...
...P ee Wee's Big Adventure was a campy curtain raiser...
...Connell's writing is plain, cool, seemingly non judgmental...
...Jhabvala's temperament (which I know only from her scripts, not from her celebrated fiction) seems stricly Apollonian...
...he describes himself as "now an Emersonian free-lance, still trying to find out God's will for me...
...How familiar...
...Sometimes he nudges the viewer a little too hard, as when he positions a woman praising psychoanalysis as "a voyage of self-discovery" in front of a case holding pre-Columbian Indian masks...
...Bridge, while retaining the reflective, ironic texture of the books, acquires forward motion as well...
...The preceding fuss over the tip has certified the accusation in advance...
...Bridge, the champion and victim of self-denial...
...Elements of fairy tale, social satire, youth market exploitation film, and horror movie aren't kept discrete but are blended or overlapped with such fluidity that you're never jolted out of the trance into which Burton has lured you...
...Bridge's nature...
...Yet I have one reservation about Jhabvala's work...
...For instance, Connell illustrates Mr...
...When Joy puts down a condescending professor who says that women do not have souls, she follows her squelching remark ("I need a little guidance here: are you being offensive, or merely stupid...
...She is a club- woman, a Sunday painter, an auditor of self-improvement lectures, a homemaker whose maid runs the household, a mother watching her children grow into strangers...
...Therefore, she can cope only with certain aspects of Connell's work...
...Her tear-blurred cry, "But she was my friend...
...One up for the American barbarian, but the scene has little more substance than that gag...
...Are the shears that both create and wound too obvious a symbol...
...He is a workaholic Kansas City lawyer who loves his wife and children deeply but never lets the word "love" pass his lips...
...In a sense, Edward is the movie Burton should have made, almost made, when he filmed Batman...
...some are touching, even "heart-warming...
...Bridge's pecuniary exac- titude (easy to mistake as miserliness) with an entire chapter's account of the lawyer thwarting a waiter's attempt to pocket an inordinate tip...
...We read a few pages of either book and may think, "How typical...
...That Shadowlands left holes in my attention for Gresham to fill suggests that it is little more than an amiable exercise in the potentially dangerous territory where love, grief, and God meet...
...I don't blame the adaptor for having to trim, but her abridgments have eliminated too much of the book's turbulence...
...The scene in its quiet theatricality is symptomatic of the weakness of the play as a whole...
...and Mrs...
...Mr Bridge (1969) is not a sequel to Mrs...
...with the pantomime of blowing smoke out of the barrel of a six-shooter...
...In Twentieth Century Authors, First Supplement, the usual autobiography was augmented in Gresham's case by an account of his life written by Joy Davidman, an affectionate portrait of a fascinating man--pulp writer, a Spanish Civil War veteran, a spiritual seeker...
...Lights fade...
...But, unlike the creators of the feverish comic book, The Dark Knight Returns, Burton shied away from portraying the misanthropic side of his hero and allowed the Joker to take over the film...
...The performances of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward deserve a whole essay rather than just passing praise...
...The greater part of both novels takes place during the 1930s...
...GERALD WEALES SCREEN SHARP EDGES 'THE BRIDGES' & 'SCISSORHANDS' conflation of the two Evan S. Connell novels, Mrs...
...This isn't quite the case...
...And, as suburbia at its best, Dianne Wiest wonderfully embodies the ultimate Avon Lady, administering make-up as if it were a magic ointment, reciting her sales pitch with the reverence due holy writ, as honored by her telephonic interview with the Avon president ("she started the same way I did, selling from door to door...
...But, by the time the punk, armed with a gun and crowbar, pursues Edward through the darkness of a gothic mansion, you may sense that Burton is slipping...
...I have been told by trustworthy friends that Shadowlands was very effective on tele- vision, but the brief scenes which may have worked well there come across here as isolated, single-point scenes...
...Connell's writing is lucid and calm but he also probes Dionysian depths...
...Lewis answers no...
...But Jhabvala inserts this incident into a later, larger, more emotional scene in which Bridge's secretary tries to express the longing she has secretly harbored for her boss tlm~ugh twenty-odd years of service...
...In fact, slipping back to Batman...
...Well, as typical and familiar as an episode of "Father Knows Best" rewritten by Edward Albee...
...Burton sweeps his camera over perfect lawns and pastel ranchhouses, lighting them in the superbright, shadowless manner of fifties' television advertising...
...We know that Nicholson cut out one of Joy Davidman's sons, as a note in the New York Times (November 30, 1990) indicates, because David Gresham did not wish to be portrayed...
...And what about the missing Mr...
...He may have been a drunk (Nightmare Alley suggests more than a casual knowledge of alcoholism) and he may have been abusive, but be was still a writer in the early 1950s when Monster Midway (1953) appeared...
...This fantasy about a synthetic waif left unfinished by the death of his kindly mad-scientist creator comes closer than any other film I have seen recently to being serenely sui generis...
...And then she walks off with the umbrella...
...By turning a jealous kid into a Teenage Psycho from Hell, he seems to be trying to give the kids in the audience the violent charge he thinks they demand...
...At some point, it occurred to me that Joy was talking about William Lindsay Gresham, whose Nightmare Alley (1946) so fascinated me in the late 1940s...
...Bridge's friend Mabel Long, has shrewdly remarked of Newman's per- formance, "Newman has thinned himself, inside and out...
...But the moviemakers might just as well have titled their project Civilization and Its Discontents...
...Bridge (1959) but a sort of literary spouse of the earlier book: it presents many of the same events from his point of view...
...But, in representing the middle class at its worst, Burton skids...
...Later, outside the restaurant, the rebuffed woman accuses Bridge of being as emotionally obtuse as he is profes- sionally and financially alert...
Vol. 118 • February 1991 • No. 3
