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Kingfisher Summer,
2004, Volume Three, Number Three page
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House of Sand and Fog
The same cannot be said of Sir Ben Kingsley. He simply becomes his complex character and portrays him with great emotional and artistic depth. Remember him in Gandhi? Masterful. And masterful again as the emigrated ex-colonel from royalist Iran, who wants to become a successful American entrepreneur, and is tragically thwarted in obtaining his version of the American dream, sacrificing his family in a confused clash of value systems in which America resembles (perhaps correctly) a corrupt and violent conflict of self-interests and gangsterism. He is totally convincing in the part.
http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert I had thought that Ebert hadn’t liked the film or properly assessed it, so I went to his website, intending to prove him rarely wrong, only to find that he had rated it as high as his ratings come. And the Internet Film Base gave it a full accolade of stars—ten of them. Don’t miss it!
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Gwyneth Pathrow Is Sylvia! This is a fine movie, and one that seems to fit into a new genre, one of a skilled contemporary actress playing the part of a famous female writer who died a suicide: Sylvia Plath. First we had luscious Nichole Kidman doing a chilling, staid version of Virginia Woolf in which she was totally unrecognizable, but brilliantly so.
Now we have Gwyneth Paltrow doing Sylvia Plath so effectively in this beautifully filmed biography. There are some remarkable physical similarities; there are even more real-life resemblances. Paltrow's father, a well-known film director, died early (as did Plath's beekeeper father), not long ago, and her mother, Actress Blythe Danner, corresponds nicely to Plath's own domineering mother, and plays her role with delicacy and steely restraint. Roger Ebert faintly praises Paltrow and gives the picture a modest three stars. He might have been not so stingy, even though his review is admirably detailed and thorough. (Rog knows his Plath.) He read most of her and Husband Ted Hughes poetry and biographical material necessary to an informed judgment. It must be that a movie today, to rate an extra star or half-star, must be exceedingly brilliant, or else the critic's award loses significance. The movie, as was Kidman's, is virtually flawless. Depressing as its foreshadowed outcome is, in both instances, it is a joy to watch a movie so carefully detailed and executed, shot by shot, move towards its conclusion. Not quite tragedy in the classical sense of the word, the two films are a joy and a pleasure to watch and, probably, to return to.
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