He could also appreciate the collegiality which could bring thorny characters on board, and let them practise their expertise, creating forward drive and enthusiasm.
Every significant change serves not just to streamline the story but also to sentimentalize Hardy's thorny characters, and to rationalize their sometimes puzzling behavior.
Playing the film's thorniest character, Ms. Linney gives by far its sharpest performance as an unhappy widow who yearns to flee South America for New York.
He was too thorny a character to fit entirely into a persona calculated for success.
It would have been easy for Mr. Holm to sentimentalize Gould by softening this thorny bohemian character who lived off handouts and made grandiose literary claims into a dreamy-eyed holy man and tragic misfit.
He has also worked steadily in the less glamorous realm of contemporary opera, and seems happiest when taking on thorny, elusive characters.
Harps and Angels has Newman's signature blend of sumptuous melodies, devastating pathos and the thorny, irony-laden character songs he jokingly dismisses as "snide, third-person shit".
Whereas Rampersad maintained a strictly reverent tone in his books on Hughes and Jackie Robinson, in his confrontations with this thorny and complex character he has taken on a new approach: an unhallowed view of his subject.
It's not that Winslet doesn't care what people think of her; at times she seems all too sensitive to the dangers she's courting by playing so many thorny, potentially unsympathetic characters.
