Word: chapter
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...between the Dutch Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens, the most popular artist of the previous generation and a court painter of the Spanish Habsburgs. A good chunk of this thick, richly illustrated book is about Rubens' background and family; Rembrandt himself is barely mentioned for an entire chapter. Schama compares paintings and history to show the anxious influence at work between Rembrandt and his older, more popular precursor. Rembrandt, Schama says, was the Great Dutch Hope, the painter whom Holland sought to "transform the physically unprepossessing specimens of the European dynasts... into so many Apollos and Dianas," just as Rubens...
...that Robbins tries to be all things to all people, a fatal flaw of most directors who try to attract mainstream audiences. Clearly he had a very specific vision in mind for this film, which is theatrical in style and pointedly liberal in its mosaic-like reconstruction of a chapter of American history. Robbins wins us over by playing it fast and loose with material that could easily have appeared dry and familiar, so that the occasional weak link and oversimplification in the film's interlocking web of stories seems irrelevant in the face of so much snowballing enthusiasm...