Word: maudlinly
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Like all of Inge's best plays, Sheba is slight of plot but musky with atmosphere. An alcoholic chiropractor (Philip Bosco) and his slatternly wife (Shirley Knight) live in a dreary house in the Midwest, diverted from maudlin introspection only by their boarder, a sprightly college student (Mia Dillon). Doom seeps through every dusty curtain. Although the husband is supposedly recovered, it is apparent that he is looking for an excuse to take a drink. Although the college girl is beloved as a surrogate for the couple's baby daughter who died 20 years before, it is evident...
...small trail of satellite painters. And it was self-consciously "revolutionary": the year was 1848, and a secret society of dangerous young subversives had become one of the special phantoms of the English mind. The P.R.B. wanted to reform English art, to drag it from the swamp of maudlin genre and low-grade history painting. They believed, with the ardent simplicity of young minds, that this decay had set in three centuries before, with Raphael. Hence they wanted to go back before Raphael, appealing to a moment in history-the Middle Ages on the cusp, as it were...
...film's notable lack of character development. Most of the characters are one dimensional, performing gratuitous actions without motivation. Why Mike chooses, for example, to play white slave to a decadent Black homosexual remains a mystery, as does most of his entire background. Similarly, though we know through rather maudlin and visibly contrived snippets on the tennis courts that Mike is Betty's former instructor, we never learn what, other than physical attraction, bonds them together...
...writers Nava and Anna Thomas have created a fat-free and vibrant script; virtually every line is soaked with relevance and insight. The spareness of El Norte's storyline never lapses into maudlin simplicity; on the contrary, it only fosters depth. The straightforward courage of its central figures (ingenuously portrayed by unknown actors) accentuates the tragedy of their fates. "All things are lent to us," Rosa chants at her father's funeral, an astonishingly forgiving utterance, given the circumstances. But it is precisely such humility and understatement that imbues the story with disturbing conviction...
Such sincerity makes for nice fairy tales, but it fails to provide the characters with the necessary degree of depth they so desperately lack. It is precisely because Hopper is such a loyal patriot and sensitive lover that the film so frequently seems maudlin, and precisely because the preps wear checkered sweaters while jeering at the working class boys that the characters seem like cardboard replicas from an I.,I., Bean catalogue...