Word: liberaloid
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More important, his characters are not the usual musical-comedy creatures. They are your basic Woody Allen folks, a family of upper-middle-class Manhattan strivers--liberaloid, neurotic, mildly dysfunctional. Mom (Goldie Hawn) numbers among her causes prison reform. So, naturally, her eldest daughter (a wonderfully surprising Drew Barrymore as a coolly appraising material girl) falls for one of the recidivists (Tim Roth, in another of his beautifully calculated bounces off the wall) her mother brings home to dinner. This leaves nice Holden (Edward Norton) in the lurch and Father (Alan Alda) fuming impotently...
...primitive contexts, where their normal habits of mind and behavior can only mislead them. Doubtless he saw Allie as a bracing variant on his favorite sort of central figure. Perhaps Weir saw in this sacred monster the makings of dark comedy; Allie is a compendium of the cliches of liberaloid social criticism, rich in potential self-parody. For besides creating an Eden for his family, Allie has another, grander dream: the construction of a huge ice-making facility he has designed. Surely there is something funny about a man building an ice palace to serve a few hundred natives...
Douglas sneaks a reel of pictures. But by the time the newshawks get back to the station, the utility's p.r. man has persuaded the news director that nothing really happened. Douglas, a hot-tempered liberaloid activist, smells a conspiracy; Fonda, a careerist, doesn't much care. She's just another pretty face introducing the human-interest stuff. But Douglas persists, the company steps up its villainy, and slowly Fonda's conscience and consciousness begin to stir...