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A nice, sane movie that never quite gets off the ground is Stanley & Iris. Well-made and well-acted as it is, it seems unlikely to catch fire in any other context.
The opening reels, which are richer and more sophisticated in tone than the rest of the picture, promise much. As a recently widowed New England bakery worker who is supporting her children as well as her unemployed sister and her loutish husband, Jane Fonda captures just the right tone of can't-be-bothered weariness.
She's appalled at the behavior of her brother-in-law, who slaps her sister (Swoosie Kurtz) in front of the children, and she's shaken when her unmarried teen-age daughter (Martha Plimpton) turns out to be pregnant. But she's almost too busy grieving to react in an effective manner.
The only distraction in her life is a budding friendship with a cafeteria worker (Robert De Niro) who turns out to be illiterate. After a series of personal disasters brought about by his inability to read, he asks her to teach him, they visit the library together, and one thing leads to another. His pride and her attachment to her dead husband occasionally get in the way, but everything works out.
Nevertheless, Stanley & Iris is quite tolerable as a star vehicle. Fonda and De Niro, who reportedly didn't get along famously off-screen, keep an interesting tension going on-screen. Occasionally they pull off a good scene - like the one in which De Niro loses his way as he tries to read street signs - that suggests how much better this movie could have been.
score /10
camerondietrich 28 March 2002
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0288431/ |
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9-8-2020 11:16:11