Genre: Thriller, Romance, Drama
Release Date: July 11, 2009
Starring: Catherine Zeta-jones, Guy Pearce,
Timothy Spall, Saoirse Ronan
Director: Gillian Armstrong
review
Gillian Armstrong's Death Defying Acts (The Weinstein Co.) is a minor but satisfying entry in the "what if" historical-fantasy genre spoofed in that old SNL skit, "What if George Washington had a robot friend?" Such movies wedge imagined characters and events into the lives of historic figures. What if Sigmund Freud treated Sherlock Holmes for cocaine addiction? What if H.G. Wells really did build a time machine and Jack the Ripper got into it and traveled to the present day? I'll admit to a total weakness for this particular brand of baloney. All a "what if" movie needs to win me over are some lush costumes and production design, a smart casting choice or two, and a really ridiculous basic idea. Death Defying Acts obliges on all fronts.
Berg, who won the very first Best Actress Emmy Award, turned The Goldbergs into a cottage industry that spawned a movie, jigsaw puzzles, a comic strip and a cookbook. But by the mid ’50s the series was running on fumes on NBC, where it was cancelled and replaced by I Love Lucy. The show’s waning seasons saw the family living comfortably in the suburbs, assimilation complete. And maybe after World War II, that’s what TV audiences wanted to see. But they didn’t want to see it from the Goldbergs, a very Jewish family with very Yiddish accents dealing with very real problems. Gertrude was a progressive voice during a non-progressive time. She was a feminist years removed from suffrage, but years away from Women’s Lib. Yet Kempner’s doc about her is not a feminist tract. It’s an appreciation of an underappreciated life and career. And it makes the domestic silliness of I Love Lucy seem downright insulting to women. Indeed, the next time you watch sitcoms like Maude or Roseanne, imagine there’s an apron-clad baleboste smiling from above and voicing her approval with, as she’d say, “all the letters of the alphabet
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