Yet these flaws are easily diluted in more than 1,000 pages, spanning 3,000 years of global history that include mythological figures, forgotten rows, extravagant characters and splinter sects.
In the case of geniuses such as Chaplin, Welles, or Cassavetes, the results are off the charts in the realm of epochal artistry; in the case of others, characteristics channelled by other directors into extravagant characters become personality-spews, warts and all.
The activity in the film is by no means extravagant; characters are shown doing banal activities like washing dishes, writing a letter, or playing outside.
As in any decent Wounded Man story, Birnbaum must come to terms with a weak and withholding father (actually, two weak fathers, his own and Camilla's) and a punishing mother (a minor, extravagant, satisfying character).
He had the rare gift of supporting extravagant female characters - Judy Garland in I Could Go On Singing (1963), Ava Gardner in The Angel Wore Red (1960), Julie Christie in Darling (1965) - without being dominated by them.
Farce, a comic dramatic piece that uses highly improbable situations, stereotyped characters, extravagant exaggeration, and violent horseplay.
There is more to Spanish film than the tormented transvestites, comatose bullfighters and other extravagant yet beloved characters of Pedro Almodóvar's works.
But both he and Ms. Swift, who poignantly elicits Milly's misguided eagerness to be bohemian, often have difficulty justifying their characters' extravagant idiosyncracies.
That dream is realised in one of several sequences that blend the characters' extravagant looks and mannerisms with vast and beautiful Australian landscapes, inferring, perhaps, that one is no more natural than the other.
Darwin suggested that female choice can help explain the evolution of extravagant secondary sexual characters in males, but he struggled over how to understand why females evolve mating preferences for such males [ 1].
"Claire's Knee" (1971), which turns on its central character's extravagant obsession with a perfectly ordinary teenage coquette, owes something to James's beloved novella "Daisy Miller".
