The father-son strife is powerfully conveyed in calm, sorrowful performances that establish the movie's bittersweet mood.
The fun is made grander and more serious by Billy Bob Thornton's sorrowful, taciturn performance in the title role and by Roger Deakins's exquisite black-and-white cinematography.
Mr. Torreton, a member of the Comedie Francaise, is a marvelous actor, compact and reserved, with a gentleness and sorrowful intelligence that prevent his performance from becoming an exercise in saintliness.
Such rebirths, they held, would continue to recur unless a person should succeed in breaking the vicious circle (releasing himself from the "sorrowful wheel") by strenuous ascetic performances.
And just as Abra eases away the harshness in Cal, so I'm sure now that Julie Harris (and Kazan) helped the wild, dangerous and very self-sorrowful young man deliver his performance.
For all its gaping crevices and dangling threads, "3 Needles" sustains a mood of sorrowful gravity, bolstered by some powerful performances, especially Ms. Channing's blowzy waitress and Ms. Sevigny's luminous novice.
Through eight days I had stood up to performance after performance of monumental, sorrowful Bach works with all my faculties intact.
Yet a defeated, slightly sorrowful air hangs over Mr. Din's performance, and the mood is infectious.
He is unrepentant: "You knew what I was when you married me!" Prowling around the house like a caged beast, Mr Depardieu confronts his failings—"Wise men are comforted by their limitations"—and emerges as sorrowful, pathetic, almost vulnerable.Yet an imposing performance by Mr Depardieu is not quite enough to rescue this film.
When this drama had its premiere as the opening-night selection of the New York Film Festival in September, Stephen Holden, writing in The New York Times, called the role "this great actor's least flamboyant performance," one that expressed "a sorrowful awareness of human complexity whose emotional depth matches anything he has done in the movies before".
