In the end, Miller was cast because of how well he played the film's final scene, the one in which his teenage vulnerability and aloneness are glimpsed in a single glance between him and his mother.
She triumphantly claims, "This was worth being born for, this single giddy glimpse, on this high place, with the sound of my own blood singing in my ears".
Our fair Baby Budd (both names suggesting youth and tenderness) experiences a single, scarifying glimpse into Hell before, both mercilessly and mercifully, he's removed from the stage.
Monty's inherited alcoholism comes down to a single locker-room glimpse of shaky hands, and some of the detail is wrong: we're told one fighter won a bronze in the 2009 Olympics.
But when the pieces of this broken mirror are reassembled in a single reading, we glimpse, through the smoke, the ironic smile of a contemporary writer of English whose vision is probably as nearly universal as it possible to be in the twenty-first century.
