There, three expert actresses — Roberta Maxwell, Jean Stapleton, and Foote's daughter Hallie — wove an elegant family tale, and in the process chronicled Central Texas history from the Confederacy to the present.
Considering it's unrevised and written earlier that morning, it's a surprisingly elegant, Borgesian tale about a Kali-like figure Urbancik calls "She" who fashions snow globes in which humans are trapped.
The Arabian Nights gives us one such; the elegant, courtly tales of Charles Perrault gives us a French version; the Grimm brothers a third.
Mags's story needed thirteen episodes in order to play out every emotional beat, but many of the show's elegant, oddball tales work just as well in forty minutes.
Thompson's "elegant and entertaining" tale "detonates a whole fireworks of happy endings -- flares of hope and success so exuberant that the book almost seems to require a warning label," Lisa Zeidner wrote in these pages last year.
Blue Jasmine is an elegant, witty and sophisticated tale that reaches back into the American literary traditions of Edith Wharton and F Scott Fitzgerald, but also Allen's own magnificent tradition of compassionate human comedy.
