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Baby Dreiser and Muse of Sorrows, a most tastefully leaden pall. Nothing like somebody else's trauma to help an aspiring novelist, thus the callow Virginian (Peter MacNicol) "unacquainted with love and a stranger to death" getting a load of both in Brooklyn ca. 1947. A rattling chandelier announces the neighbors at the boardinghouse, the Polish-Catholic immigrant (Meryl Streep) and the volatile Jew (Kevin Kline) caught in a Liebestod of their own. She has Auschwitz numbers tattooed on her arm, he obsesses with the Holocaust through euphoric and dark moods, the rookie is a fascinated third wheel. "You were in that concentration camp?" "Yeah, I can't talk about that, though." Escaping torment in one continent only to embrace it in another, the lass is a translucent wraith nursing a dolorous secret. So naturally the focus is on the horny literary runt whose greatest tragedy is a case of blue balls. (Writing at the top of his voice, as Wilde would say, he rhapsodizes about "the goddess of my unending fantasies" whose lust "was both a plunge into carnal oblivion and a flight from memory and grief.") Cinema is optional when it comes to glazed best-seller adaptations, Alan J. Pakula accordingly trades probing anxiety for plodding worthiness. A study of an actress at work, cf. Klute, the survivor's emotional armature vis-à-vis Streep's virtuoso technique. Flashbacks paint a muddy hell with a manicured garden behind barbed wire, the heroine facing the camera for her remembrance is a tinted Botticelli and her unspeakable decision a quavering Munch. "The truth does not make it easier to understand, you know." It starts out as Jules et Jim, passes through The Pawnbroker and settles for Summer of '42. All that's left is for Spielberg to paste a happy ending a decade later. Cinematography by Néstor Almendros. With Greta Turken, Rita Karin, Stephen D. Newman, Josh Mostel, Robin Bartlett, Eugene Lipinski, and Günther Maria Halmer.
--- Fernando F. Croce |