Glenn Close, Dangerous Liaisons

Friday, April 08, 2005

Stanley Kauffmann

Aristocrats are troublesome in a film. If the piece is going to work properly, they have somehow to cow us a bit, to make us feel a little inferior and jealous. One reliable way to ahndle the problem is to use English actors with upper-class accents--the Leslie Howard--C. Aubrey Smith route. But this method is tossed aside by the makers of Dangerous Liaisons. All the principal roles are cast with Americans, and not even for box-office pull--none of these actors is bankable. [not even Close fresh off Fatal Attraction?] Whatever the reason, the actors sound (apart from what they actually say) like people we might know. Which is not quite the point of the enterprise.

. . . . The whole being of this 18th-century piece depends on our conviction that its sexual intrigues are the work of people condemned, by their exalted social station, to lives of self-indulgence and diversion, people who believe that the world was organized to put and keep them in their station. That conviction is missing here.

The member of the cast hwo does best, in this regard, is Mildred Natwick . . . .

Merteuil, Valmont's diabolic co-conspirator, is played by Glenn Close--intelligent, comprehending, acutely modulated. Close does particularly well with the long speeches in which she relates her resolution to get all possible satisfaction from her socially restricted position as a woman. And, after Natwick, Close comes nearest to credibility as a member of the class she says is hers. . . .

Stanley Kauffmann
New Republic, January 2, 1989
[LO some--check it out on Pfeiffer, Malkovich, and gen comments at end

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