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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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050189
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05018900.002
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1990-09-17
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CINEMA, Page 68Dreams to AvoidBy Richard Corliss
MISS FIRECRACKER
Directed by Thomas Schlamme
Screenplay by Beth Henley
Movies are show; plays are tell. Here's one difference. In Beth
Henley's 1984 off-Broadway hit The Miss Firecracker Contest, a
seamstress named Popeye Jackson explained that as a child she "used
to make little outfits for the bullfrogs that lived out around our
yard." In this expansive adaptation, Popeye (Alfre Woodard)
displays one such frog, cunningly coutured in a nurse's gown with
matching stethoscope. Ah, the glamorous realism of the cinema! It's
cute too.
As screenwriter, Henley has dramatized elements only hinted at
in her play, but the story is the same. Sweet, just slightly trampy
Carnelle (Holly Hunter) determines to win the Miss Firecracker
Contest as a way of standing up to the mocking townspeople and
claiming some of the limelight that illuminates her chic, snooty
cousin Elain (Mary Steenburgen). Two men, Carnelle's sometime lover
Mac Sam (Scott Glenn) and Elain's wild brother Delmount (Tim
Robbins), act as a geek chorus to the drama, but, typically in a
Henley play, the real conflict is between young women clawing each
other for respect, attention and love.
The movie's tone is high-pitched and precise. Everybody plays
to the max, especially Steenburgen, sweet magnolia condescension
dripping from every elongated syllable, and Hunter, crazy for
acceptance, clinging to Delmount, desperately fanning the summer
heat off Elain's body. They serve well this fable about the need
to realize that some dreams are better off not coming true, at
least in a town where the local tramp is the wisest soul around and
the pouting princess is revealed as a frog who needs to put a
stethoscope to her own porcelain heart.