Word: backwoodsman
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Less remarkable, though full of courage and emotional range, is Sam Waterston's portrayal of the backwoodsman turned reluctant candidate in a dozen scenes spanning a quarter-century, as Lincoln rises from law student to President-elect. He is the center of an impressive production of a once esteemed play that is now interesting chiefly as a barometer of how tastes, political mores and media behavior have changed...
There is not much to be said for the other performances, since the other characters are all types, one-note foils for Mandel to play off of. Besides the aforementioned Evil Brother and Idealistic Scientist, there is the Boozing Wife, the Senile Cat Lady, the Crusty Backwoodsman, the Angry Neighbor, the Venal Lawyer, and the Stuck-up In-laws. Walk is basically Mandel's showpiece, and no one is allowed to upstage...
...July, fossilized by dread of winter, may think that he has understood the New Hampshire soul. This is not likely. What the tourist is almost certain to miss is that the New Hampshireman may not be wrestling with the prospect of the winter immediately ahead. "Aye-yuh," the foresighted backwoodsman is thinking, "summah's about petered out, and then we got six-seven months uh wintah, guess we'll make it, just barely, and then after the black flies, we got summah again for a couple uh weeks, and then, damn sure, we got wintah...
...Housman did not have Bruce Pearson in mind when he wrote "To an Athlete Dying Young." Pearson, a third-string catcher for the New York Mammoths, is impossible to cast in the heroic Grecian mode. He is a Georgia backwoodsman who can't get the hang of spitting his tobacco accurately, let alone of making his teammates respect or even like him very much. His only distinction is that he has been prematurely touched by mortality, in the form of Hodgkin's disease...
Jutra is creating a mythic figure here, and he gives his mythology the distance it needs to appear large. He makes this backwoodsman a regional folk hero, but at the same time he shows, from a distance, the conditions that forced the man to leave a large family in need of a father. Underneath the surface dignity of a Paul Bunyan figure we see the desperate position of an impoverished man. The irony of this situation depends on the objective and unemotional tone the film has maintained up to this point. If we approached too close to Poulin, his mythical...