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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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121189
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12118900.002
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1990-09-22
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CINEMA, Page 93Warty Worm
SHE-DEVIL
Directed by Susan Seidelman
Screenplay by Mark R. Burns and Barry Strugatz
Watching Meryl Streep as Mary Fisher, romance novelist, is like
seeing Margaret Thatcher play the horse in a Christmas pantomime
-- and with delicious style. The great gray lady of movie drama
brings her precise acting tools to a comedy of manners, flouncing
wittily onto a couch, exhaling every word in swooning intimacy,
switching from fawn to fume in the wink of a lover's indiscretion.
She can even speak American English without an accent. Surprise!
Inside the Greer Garson roles Streep usually plays, a vixenish
Carole Lombard is screaming to be cut loose.
Streep is the one reason to catch (maybe next year on video)
this choppy adaptation of Fay Weldon's exemplarily mean-spirited
novel. The story could serve as a parable of feminist revenge. Mary
steals accountant Bob Patchett (Ed Begley Jr.) away from his fat,
drab, warty wife Ruth (Roseanne Barr). Then Ruth, with a systematic
resourcefulness she has never displayed as a homemaker, destroys
everything Bob loves: house, family, career, freedom. The worm
turns into a winner.
As a BBC-TV series, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil went
gleefully over the top, pitying or despising all its characters.
But comedy on the American plan can go soft, as Barr proved when
she gave her abrasive stand-up-comic persona a sweetie-pie makeover
for her hit TV show. She-Devil does the same to Weldon, without
substituting much style or attitude. The movie is its own sitcom
pilot, and only Streep watchers will be laughing.