Poetry
Nixon, John Jr.
John Nixon, Jr. Second Primer The rules for second childhood are the same As for the first. Wash everywhere. Be true. To the extent you can, assist the lame. Revere your maker. Speak when...
...In these confrontations between man of God and man of power, Bergman's writing attains its cruel zenith and the acting is demonically brilliant...
...And grows talons...
...The mating dance is over and, together under the same dilapidated roof, the couple begin to really reveal themselves in clashes and rapprochements that are as intense and scathing as anything in Bergman's master, Strindberg, or for that matter, in Bergman's own work...
...For, in this movie with its familiar Bergman theme of the prison house of personality, Henrik, whose sense of God's justice is so much greater than his sense of God's love, is the loneliest prisoner of them all...
...He uses spatial relationships to create tension, comedy, pathos...
...The plight of an abused child whom Henrik shelters seems at first Dickensian in its pathos until the little boy, though acted with bruising individuality, is revealed to be the embodiment of the Barren North for Anna...
...The big-screen version of The Best Intentions isn't a mere abridgment of the six-hour film that August and Bergman created for Swedish television...
...We won't know until PBS or video format makes the six-hour movie available, but I will hazard that the TV version contains scenes that portray Henrik more vividly in its first half than the theatrical rendition does...
...Pernilla August's facial reactions to the boy's fall from Henrik's favor precisely chart Anna's psychological journey from tolerance through meanspirited rejection through cruel triumph to, finally, self-disgust and repentance...
...As far as The Best Intentions is concerned, less is not more...
...It's an unforgettable picture of love keeping hopelessness at bay...
...Particularly wonderful is the final image of Henrik and Anna, now embarking upon a second phase of their marriage after estrangement: he on a park bench, she on another a few feet away, they're separated by a space which they bridge by gazing into each other's eyes...
...Its aim is to work on our emotions simply, directly, piercingly...
...the incipience of physical violence...
...Meanwhile, my appetite is whetted...
...Speak when spoken to...
...But what could that something be...
...Henrik and the factory owner confront each other with the length of an entire church between them until Henrik's more fiery temper forces him down the center aisle, a move that is both an attack and a capitulation...
...class resentments finding their focus on one's own marital partner...
...Nevertheless, it's safe to say that Bergman wrote (or at least planned) the longer script first, then mined it for the theatrical release...
...In this second half, August's direction cuts to the bone as surely as does Bergman's writing...
...I'm willing to bet that the longer script has something that will make the courtship half of the story more exciting at three hours than its theatrical counterpart is at ninety minutes...
...The subplots of this second half contribute to the evocation of inner fires even when they seem to be the stuff of social rather than psychological drama...
...Henrik has accepted a post in the far north, ministering to factory workers and their families...
...It is a separate work with several scenes differently written and shot...
...But when, in the middle of the film, Anna and Henrik are married, The Best Intentions takes wing...
...If his relationships with his mistress, his teachers and fellow students, and his estranged relatives bring the tormented seminarian into sharp focus early in the film, then the later portrait of the tormented priest will be even more powerful than it already is...
...A courtier, having advised Henrik and Anna upon the proper etiquette for an interview with the Queen about a royal appointment, performs a sort of dance without music as he stalks between Her Highness and the commoners...
...But it's hard for that emotional piercing to happen while we are being connoisseurs of great acting...
...work...
...RICHARD alleva...
...the alternation of bitter comedy with vitriolic fury...
...the dredging up of past offenses thought to be long forgotten even by the one who dredges them up...
...The Strindbergian method operates at full strength: the terrible festering silence of the male while the female shrilly harangues to the point where she starts hearing herself harangue...
...Henrik's conflict with a factory owner at first threatens to be conventional social protest, but Bergman gradually makes it clear that the businessman is no conventional heavy but a man whose torment mirrors Henrik's own...
Vol. 119 • September 1992 • No. 16
