I think that the movie has a sentimental streak that somewhat vitiates its (otherwise formidable) emotional and intellectual force: the protagonists take significant risks in launching their do-it-yourself detective adventure, but there isn't much sense of the emotional risks involved in friendship and intimacy themselves.
In a film like The Help, we get the sense that while the African American maids in the story (the spiritual center of the film) are noble and, for the most part, dignified in their long-suffering service to an oppressive society, the white protagonist (the intellectual center of the film) is, in fact, "the help".
In that capacity, the military has become the principal protagonist in an intellectual debate, raging since antiquity, that pits individual moral responsibility against determinism — the belief that historical, cultural, ethnic, economic, and other antecedent forces determine the future of men and nations.
His protagonists were sweetly intellectual teen-age boys smitten with complicated, charismatic girls.
But of the leading protagonists in that intellectual cauldron, only one titanic figure remains, Claude Lanzmann, whose memoir is published in the UK this month.
For Mr Castañeda is a rara avis, a cosmopolitan Mexican who spends part of each year teaching at New York University, an intellectual who entered politics, and a protagonist in several of the most important political debates in contemporary Latin America.
Everett's previous protagonists - disillusioned professors, intellectual babies, walking corpses - have rarely fitted neatly into their surroundings.
Joyce and Ray end up married with two children; their rebellious-yet-intellectual daughter Zoe becomes the next protagonist while Joyce fades into a hinterland of curtain making, low-key romance and husband-bolstering, and so another entirely ordinary life story begins.
The protagonist, a moody, faintly Dostoyevskyan intellectual named Isaac Ricardo Trêpaa), is a professional photographer who develops his prints in a darkroom and hangs them from a clothesline strung across his room.
Edmond as protagonist is, in emotional and intellectual terms, an odd mix of the settled and the restless, which causes him to move associatively from one scholarly compulsion to the next.
There the female protagonist, Lin Shan, is a poet and intellectual in a culture that suppresses women's freedoms.
