In his review for The New York Times, Ben Brantley praised Mr. McClure's "heartbreaking grace" while blasting the show's clumsy, flashback-heavy narrative structure, "vaporous music" and "vaguely period dances that go on forever without going anywhere".
In her charmed literary history, this clumsy and laborious narrative will be the closest she's come to a miss.
By making a non-white contestant sympathetic, rather than villainized in tacitly coded ways, the show signals, if not a shift in allegiance, a clumsy awareness of narratives that aren't centered on white protagonists.
As awkward as this narrative leap feels, its clumsy execution inflicts minimal damage on a story about a man poised defiantly between two realities: the one outside his front door and the one sprawling across his backyard.
In clumsier hands it would be easy to get lost amid the expanding thicket of narrative twists.
But the abstract animations don't help forge this bond — and the sometimes clumsy dialogue in the narrative portions doesn't help, either.
Later a professor of classical antiquity, she was acutely conscious of the difference between the common Berlin dialect and the High German of the educated which makes some of the clumsy inelegance in her narrative surprising.
There are some great moments and interesting ideas and concepts (they have razor-sharp thumbnails rather than fangs) but every plus is countered by a minus, such as a clumsy lurch in the narrative or a thinly described character.
By the time you finally see that face in full, its eyes are closed because Nora is now literally on ice, awaiting the burial that gives this slight, sentimental movie its narrative shape and clumsy comedy.
The high-stakes race to find and authenticate the Ash-LaMotte correspondence is squeezed into an annoying subplot, and Mr. LaBute is too clumsy to translate the exquisite, maddening narrative drive that Ms. Byatt sustains for more than 400 pages.
More difficult is to create lyrics and music, as Townshend did in "Quadrophenia," that work in service of a bigger narrative cause -- without being clumsy or excessively deliberate.
