Word: wan
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Guinness would search the globe for new accents and characters: Japanese (A Majority of One), Bedouin (Lawrence of Arabia), Russian (Doctor Zhivago), Indian (A Passage to India). His transparency made it easy for him to incarnate specters; he was Marley's Ghost in Scrooge and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars--the role that heaped on him the annoyance of multigenerational fame. But "the force" was not with Guinness; delicacy and subversive wit were...
...another fellow carrying around a sign that read "Nominate Jimmy Carter to Unite the Reform Party." And there was Jim Bourassa, founding chairman of the Arizona Reform party, who wears on his jacket not a political button but a large photograph of recently-deceased actor Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Bourassa says the photo gives him otherworldly powers to wrest political might away from Buchanan. "We're using the Force to save the party," he says with a straight face. "I am Arizona's Luke Skywalker." Well, if John McCain's not using that shtick anymore...
...There's a third category - the gifts to lesser, later movies. The blind butler Jamessir Bensonmum in "Murder by Death." The mummified chief clerk in "Kafka." Obi-Wan Kenobi in "Star Wars," eyes glittering with wisdom, salvaging that tortured Lucas dialogue. Would there be a "Phantom Menace" without Guinness's saving injection of class in the first installment...
...Hearing of Guinness's unrelenting modesty and bland wit, one is tempted to look for the actor's true self in some of the Ealing Studios comedies, perhaps "The Lavender Hill Mob" and its wan-on-the-outside hero, or the fabric wizard and social innocent of "The Man in the White Suit." But thinking that's Guinness up there onscreen is a mistake. He once said, "I try to get inside a character and project him - one of my own private rules of thumb is that I have not got a character until I have mastered exactly...
...mean that as a lament. The first moment back on campus, I felt a lingering feeling that something somewhere was due--a lurking dread, a ghost in the system. At the end of two semesters back, my hands ache, my days are filled with errands and I look with wan sadness at sunny days as I sit editing a paper. It was like being away taught me nothing about how to tame the competitive feeling that seems to be in the water here. I saw the limitations, pulling at me the first few weeks back--but somehow, they still dragged...