Sunday, April 10, 2005

David Denby

“…. Isn't this the way many marriages end these days? A lot of silent suffering, then a sudden collapse. We don't know what's wrong with Joann, but we can see that she's bouncing off the walls of her gray-beige East Side apartment like a moth inside a silk lampshade. When she says she's had it, that's that . . . The Corman book … was a bland, journalistic novel about mediocre people. But the Benton movie is a major dramatic work--startling, emotionally involving, with characters that are now larger and finer in every way….

“The courtroom scene is perhaps the greatest test of Benton's honor as a filmmaker and a man, because the temptation to turn Joanna into an annihilating bitch must have been strong. But Benton is too shrewd for that--he rejects polemics in favor of understanding. He makes Joanna highly sympathetic. As she explains, tearfully at first, then proudly, she needed to go off and find her self-confidence and a professional identity before she could feel adequate as a mother….

“Meryl Streep, of course, doesn't get the plummy, heartwarming moments; it's not her movie, yet she ennobles it with her cool, non-actressy radiance. Her beauty is till mysterious for us--the sharply stenciled brow, the small, precisely cut features seem almost Minoan in their strangeness. At first, Benton uses her as a kind of icon. The opening shot--a close-up as she says good-bye to Billy--gives an almost Vermeerish cast to her face, and later, when she spies on Billy and Ted from behind a window, she looks witchlike, sinister. But in the climactic courtroom scene the mystery drops away. Her Joanna is not demonic, just restless in the modern way. She left her child because she was betraying herself; now that she possesses her own identity (her high-salaried job is a bit miraculous, but we'll let that pass [hm]), she wants him back. Joanna's jargon-ridden language is banal, but the feeling, the mixture of guilt and pride, is not, and Streep, avoiding all the traditional acting clichés of frustrated mother love, builds the emotion to a peak without ever raising her voice.”

David Denby
New York, December 17, 1979

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