Word: spirit
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Samantha Hughes (Emily Lloyd) of In Country, an adaptation of the novel by Bobbie Ann Mason, is a direct, even artless, projection of this healing spirit. There is nothing metaphoric about the empty space left in her life by the war; her father was killed in Viet Nam before she could know him. Her mother having remarried and moved away, Samantha has chosen to stay behind and share the tumbledown family home in Hopewell, Ky., with her uncle Emmett (Bruce Willis), a veteran damaged by the war in some way he refuses to name. Now in the summer after...
Samantha's straight-ahead spirit as evoked by Lloyd is irresistibly winning. Eventually it becomes the wedge that pries Emmett out of his shell and forces the girl's grandmother Mamaw (Peggy Rea) to face the feelings that she too has denied since her son's death. These are superb performances as well: Willis has never employed his alert reserve to better effect; Rea perfectly catches both the refrigerator-tidying comedy and the unspoken yearnings of an American Everymom...
...early passages, In Country's script perhaps pursues too many banal and inconsequential matters as it portrays teen life in a small town. Samantha has a boyfriend who does not match her in wit and spirit. She has a girlfriend contending with an unwelcome pregnancy. But the film starts to gather force and direction when a dance, organized to honor the local Viet vets, works out awkwardly. And when -- at Samantha's insistence -- Emmett and Mamaw join her on a pilgrimage to the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the movie achieves real power. Director Norman Jewison understates his final...
...litigious storm swirling around the America's Cup. After the San Diego Yacht Club defeated a challenger from New Zealand a year ago, a New York judge took the Cup away from skipper Dennis Conner and awarded it to the loser. The judge reasoned that Conner had violated the "spirit" of the competition by racing a featherweight catamaran as a last-minute response to New Zealand's extra-long 132-ft. monohull...
...spirit of glasnost, the USSR agreed to establish a joint commission with Poland to investigate the massacre. This spring, the Polish delegation grew impatient with their Soviet counterparts and announced their findings independently. They blamed the Red Army...