Film Analysis: "Boesman and Lena" -- a drama of ideas, not people
The central protagonists of Athol Fugard's drama "Boesman and Lena" have what turns out to be a nearly impossible life task. Not only, the drama suggests, must they struggle to survive having lost their home and community. To become emotionally whole again, the depressed Lena and controlling Boesman must find a way to reconstruct their previous relationship as man and wife, to find some emotional comfort in a place of desolation. Gradually, as Fugard's narrative evolves, it becomes clear to the viewer that this will not be possible, that the two are too broken by the oppressive web of the apartheid system to really recreate a loving partnership. However, it also becomes clear to the viewer of the filmed version of "Boesman and Lena" that the actors who play the protagonists in this drama of the South African playwright have an even more daunting task -- these actors cannot really convey these characters as fully human entities. Rather, Boesman and Lena, despite the emotional force of the acting evidenced in Danny Glover's and Angela Bassett's portrayals manage to exist only as symbols, not as fully developed human beings with complex feelings and relationships with one another.
It is hard to believe that the two angry, screaming characters on the beach and in the shantytown ever existed as husband and wife in anything approaching a loving partnership. The film is only an ineffectual rendering of what appears to be a dated play, and the film makes no effort to either update the feminine passivity of Lena for modern audiences or even to vary Fugard's sparse staging techniques for the more expansive canvas of cinema. True, when viewing the bleakness of the marriage, neither the film nor the play aimed to show Fugard's duo at their best. The play begins depicting Boesman and Lena as scavengers, left with nothing. This literal state of being stripped down to their barest essences mirrors their barren mutual emotional states, and the child they have lost. There is nothing left of...
Cain (afterward coupled by Mickey Spillane, Horace McCoy, and Jim Thompson) -- whose books were also recurrently tailored in films noir. In the vein of the novels, these films were set apart by a subdued atmosphere and realistic violence, and they presented postwar American cynicism to the extent of nihilism by presuming the total and hopeless corruption of society and of everyone in it. Billy Wilder's acidic Double Indemnity
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Conclusion It is hard to deny that Sophie's Choice indeed has the trifecta of what I believe good movie-making needs: superb acting, sound, and cinematography, as it was nominated excellence in acting (won by Meryl Streep), cinematography, and music by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual Academy Awards. While I have seen many movies, few have touched me the way Sophie's Choice has. I can remember the seamless
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