Stanley rages and gets drunk but eventually toes the line. Fired when his boss learns he can’t tell the difference between labels that say Sugar and Roach Powder, Stanley turns to Iris for help. Literacy experts are likely to be similarly nonplused by Stanley & Iris. Purists are still having conniptions over that one. Back in 1959, Ritt, Ravetch and Frank collaborated on a film version of the William Faulkner classic The Sound and the Fury that rearranged the novel’s intricate time sequence and changed the central character of Quentin from a man to a woman. The writers might have done better starting from scratch, but that’s asking for logic. He’s a script excuse to introduce the topic of illiteracy. As for Stanley, the cook in the bakery where Iris works, he didn’t figure in the novel at all. Somehow the novel has been transformed into a story of a New England widow named Iris (Fonda) who frosts cakes to support her two children, played by Martha Plimpton and Harley Cross. The screenplay is based on Pat Barker’s 1983 novel Union Street, about working-class life in Great Britain. Part of the problem is the source material. But the characters in the film don’t embody the issue, they merely illustrate it. Stanley & Iris properly bemoans a devastating statistic: 27 million Americans over the age of seventeen cannot read or write. All three films were preachy, but each succeeded by starting with a solid foundation of character. This trio has taken on greed (Hud), prejudice (Conrack) and union busting (Norma Rae). Director Martin Ritt and the husband-and-wife screenwriting team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. Last year alone, blindness and deafness (See No Evil, Hear No Evil), mental illness (The Dream Team) and senility ( Dad) became fodder for farce, while infertility ( Immediate Family), disfigurement (Johnny Handsome) and seizures ( Steel Magnolias) provided the bubbles for soap opera.Ĭredit Stanley & Iris for its good intentions. For every My Left Foot, which treats cerebral palsy with unflinching honesty, there are other films that exploit real afflictions. But the packaging of disabilities for mass box-office consumption has become an alarming trend. Socially conscious films about everything from alcoholism (The Lost Weekend) to autism (Rain Man) dot the Oscar honor roll. There’s nothing wrong with Fonda’s idea in theory. “I’m a believer that movies can make a difference,” declared Fonda, who claimed that Stanley & Iris – in which she plays a recent widow who tutors an illiterate cook played by Robert De Niro – was a movie that could both “entertain and, perhaps, change things a bit.” In the minutes before a critics’ screening of Stanley & Iris, I was thumbing through the program notes and read a quote from Jane Fonda, one of the film’s stars, that filled me with dread.
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