HOME / summary judgment: Highlights from the week in criticism.

Reviewers reviewed.

By David GreenbergPosted Wednesday, Nov. 6, 1996, at 3:30 AM ET

(posted Tuesday, Nov. 5)

Movie
William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (20^th Century Fox). This modern-dress, teen-targeted version of Shakespeare's romance, directed by Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom), has been greeted warily by critics, who deemed it "frenetic" and likened it to an MTV video or a Ken Russell film. "A classic play thrown in the path of a subway train," as the New York Times' Janet Maslin puts it. But Maslin and others found enough redeeming features (originality, flashy style) to consider the film "sometimes successful." Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times writes "it has enough positive energy and dizzying high spirits to make it irresistible." SLATE's Alex Ross calls it "one of the more operatic Hollywood creations of recent years." (Stills, soundtrack, etc., available at the promotional site for the film.)

Movie

Ransom (Touchstone Pictures). Ron Howard's film about a New York airline mogul whose son is kidnapped is receiving equal parts of ridicule and hype. In the latter category, Entertainment Weekly runs a splashy cover story asking whether Mel Gibson is worth the $20 million he was paid to star. But critics deplore the film's combination of high-budget glossiness--"filled with big-Hollywood guff," says New York's David Denby--and monotony, predictability, and lack of depth. Not even its action sequences meet with approval. "What is most risible about Howard's movie is its penchant for unearned intensity," says The New Yorker's Anthony Lane, "and what is most depressing is that as a result it forfeits the right to be any fun." (Trailers available through Buena Vista/Touchstone.)

Book

Reflected Glory: The Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman, by Sally Bedell Smith (Simon & Schuster). Critics relish this gossip-filled biography of the 20^th century's greatest courtesan and the current U.S. ambassador to France. In the Washington Post "Book World," gossip columnist Charlotte Hays says that former New York Times reporter Sally Bedell Smith has written "a grand tour about high society in London, Paris, New York and Washington that reads like a racy history book" (it chronicles Harriman's marriages and affairs with Winston Churchill's son Randolph, Averell Harriman, and Edward R. Murrow, to name a few). In the Wall Street Journal, Stanley Weintraub calls the unauthorized--and unflattering--account "brash" and "delicious."

Book

The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family, by Suzannah Lessard (Dial Press). Suzannah Lessard's sometime memoir, sometime family history about her great-grandfather, the architect Stanford White, and his descendants, has met with almost uniform enthusiasm. In the New York Times Book Review, Paul Goldberger praises the deftness with which Lessard weaves an artistic appreciation of White's work with an account of how his notoriously deviant sexuality left its mark on her generation. (White was murdered by the husband of Evelyn Nesbit, with whom White had an affair while she was still a teen-ager.) The New York Observer's Jeffrey Hogrefe calls Lessard's book "a wildly original work of evocative writing." The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley, on the other hand, finds it's "memoir as therapy ... gratuitous and unconvincing" (in the process of writing, the author recovers memories of being molested by her father), though the rest of the book is "uncommonly good."

Art

"Corot," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; "In the Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open-Air Painting," at the Brooklyn Museum. Both shows celebrate the 200^th anniversary of the birth of this pre-Impressionist French artist, and nearly all critics celebrate the shows. The New York Times' Michael Kimmelman calls the Brooklyn show "the season's sleeper," though he alone among critics finds the larger exhibit at the Met "uneven and too big ... [and] unlikely to raise his standing." SLATE's Christopher Benfey, "mesemeriz[ed]" by the shows, credits the Met's with re-establishing Corot's reputation as more than just a landscapist who influenced Monet and Degas. Splitting the difference is Time's Robert Hughes, who, in reviewing the retrospective last winter in Paris, said that Corot, though not "as good as people thought ... [is] much better than we now tend to suppose." Some logistics for attending the shows available at the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Play

The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde, at the Irish Repertory Theater. Acclaimed set designer Tony Walton (Guys and Dolls, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) makes his directorial debut with Wilde's classic comedy, but reviewers praise little more than its sets. "He has designed it beautifully," says the New York Observer's John Heilpern, who otherwise faults the incompatible acting styles of the principals. "As a designer, Mr. Walton doesn't disappoint," says the New York Times' Ben Brantley, in an otherwise vicious pan.

--Compiled by David Greenberg

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David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998.

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