Fine film, produced and directed by Paul Newman and based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Paul Zindel. Impeccable screenplay (by Alvin Sargent), wonderful music with melancholy and reflective tones by Maurice Jarre, intense acting by Joanne Woodward.
Beatrice is a widow with two teenage daughters. The house where she lives is kept in total disarray, the patio is full of trash, her car could use a good wash. Beatrice is a failure and knows it, hates the world and seeks opportunities for redemption that no one offers her. Cynical and scornfully ironic, she commiserates with herself and despises others. Her daughters, Matilda and Ruth, could not be more different. Matilda, 13, has a passion for science, goes to school with the pleasure of learning things that make the world a fascinating adventure for her, and is sweet-natured and reserved, endowed with an inherent humanity that makes her view with favor even the elderly tenants her mother takes in as tenants, almost always people who are sick and near death, left there by relatives who want to get rid of them. Ruth, 17, experiences all the problems of being a teen-ager, but she also suffers from seizures, perhaps also due to the strong psychological pressure of living with a neurotic, narcissistic and selfish mother, forced by lack of money to care for all these elderly people who go to die in her house. Beatrice's only chance to rise morally from her hellish life is to constantly think back to the past, idealize her cheerleading adolescence, and plan important projects to accomplish which she has neither the determination nor the money to do. In this utterly negative context Matilda nevertheless manages to keep her optimism, her love of life, and her irrepressible interest in knowledge intact. She is entrusted with the film's final word: "Every atom in me, in all of us, comes from the sun, from places that are beyond our dreams: the atoms of our hands, those of our hearts. Atom, atom, what a wonderful word...No mom, I don't hate the world." Paul Newman gave his daughter, who plays the character of Matilda, a beautiful and intense character that generates love.
Beatrice is a widow with two teenage daughters. The house where she lives is kept in total disarray, the patio is full of trash, her car could use a good wash. Beatrice is a failure and knows it, hates the world and seeks opportunities for redemption that no one offers her. Cynical and scornfully ironic, she commiserates with herself and despises others. Her daughters, Matilda and Ruth, could not be more different. Matilda, 13, has a passion for science, goes to school with the pleasure of learning things that make the world a fascinating adventure for her, and is sweet-natured and reserved, endowed with an inherent humanity that makes her view with favor even the elderly tenants her mother takes in as tenants, almost always people who are sick and near death, left there by relatives who want to get rid of them. Ruth, 17, experiences all the problems of being a teen-ager, but she also suffers from seizures, perhaps also due to the strong psychological pressure of living with a neurotic, narcissistic and selfish mother, forced by lack of money to care for all these elderly people who go to die in her house. Beatrice's only chance to rise morally from her hellish life is to constantly think back to the past, idealize her cheerleading adolescence, and plan important projects to accomplish which she has neither the determination nor the money to do. In this utterly negative context Matilda nevertheless manages to keep her optimism, her love of life, and her irrepressible interest in knowledge intact. She is entrusted with the film's final word: "Every atom in me, in all of us, comes from the sun, from places that are beyond our dreams: the atoms of our hands, those of our hearts. Atom, atom, what a wonderful word...No mom, I don't hate the world." Paul Newman gave his daughter, who plays the character of Matilda, a beautiful and intense character that generates love.
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