Because how could middle-aged critics hope to understand the dark complexities of adolescent female sexuality?
Female friendship, in all its lovely layers and potentially dark complexities, is inexhaustible grist for film, television and literature — from "Heathers" and "Mean Girls" to "Thelma and Louise," "Sex and the City," "Gossip Girl" and "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants".
(For instance: is there any more thankless, underwritten character than Ophelia, compared with the dark complexities of Hamlet?) It is true that all readers and watchers shed gender (and race and sexuality), attaching their understanding and sympathy to people vastly unlike themselves – this is the basic act of readerly empathy.
But the dissonant music heard between scenes suggests the production is also striving for a darker complexity it rarely achieves.
But the dissonant music heard between scenes suggests the production is striving for a darker complexity that it rarely achieves.
But "after a tantalising dip into a darker complexity it bounces straight back up to the surface and becomes what its provenance fates it to be – a sentimental exercise about love and family loyalty".
Tangy slices of smoked breast, fanned out around an appetizer plate, have the dark, rich complexity and the long finish of one of the Bordeaux on Bayard's knockout wine list, a lengthy document, peppered with bargains, that many restaurants would kill for.
His last dramatic masterpiece, Little Nell, about Dickens and Ellen Ternan, was given short shrift by the critics, but it will come back and be properly recognised, in all its dark, nightmarish complexity, as will his as yet unproduced Hullabaloo, an extraordinary Dionysian fantasia.
Greenman doesn't attempt to reinvent this particular brand of fiction, nor does he delve deeply into the dark psychological complexities of his characters; instead, he skates on the surface of William's consciousness.
Yet the film doesn't divulge the dark, twisted complexities beneath the surface, the nuances of Amy's psychopathy, Nick's sickened resentment and their ultimate addiction to destroying one another.
