But it's this antique-hunting approach to filmmaking that keeps Saints characters at arm's length.
By downgrading the teacher from saint to character to caricature, high-school films of the John Hughes variety heralded teachers' loss of cultural prestige: hastening their slide down the rungs of respectability from dignified to doltish to outright dysfunctional.
In "Liars and Saints," her characters settle in, among other perfectly rendered places, free-love Hawaii in the 1970's, the Louisiana of rich Southern belles and bohemian Seattle, but the real landscape of the book is the geography of family, with its intimate connections and concerns, no matter how far the Santerres may stray from home.
Their patron saint is the character actor Roberts Blossom, who rises in one scene to orate on the time he saw Bigfoot.
Her rebellious saint of a character, Clara, tries desperately to save the workers on a plantation where workers are being infected.
The central character, Saint-Preux, is a middle-class preceptor who falls in love with his upper-class pupil, Julie.
Stockett wisely does not make an angel or a saint of her characters, but delves into their thoughts and dreams as they navigate the oppressive complexities of their lives.
Where Hyppolite used Catholic and voodoo symbols, Walker's saint figure is a character she calls the Negress.
But "Dark Horse" is a Todd Solondz movie, which means, among other things, that Abe is neither a sweet Apatovian schlub nor a stoner saint like the title character in Mark and Jay Duplass's "Jeff, Who Lives at Home".
These contradictions arise in part from Saint-Just's complex character and in part from an imperfect knowledge of his childhood and adolescence.
In the one-act plays In the Shadow of the Glen (first performed 1903) and Riders to the Sea (1904) and the three-act The Well of the Saints (1905), the language, character, and humour of the Irish peasant, not least the female peasant, were rendered in a manner that broke with earlier comic depictions by Macklin, Sheridan, and others.
