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Three terminally-ill cancer patients dwell in separate cottages on a hospital's grounds, where they are attended and visited by both family and close friends.

Christopher Plummer and Joanne Woodward in The Shadow Box (1980)

Exteriorly a very Newmanish drama; in fact, a failure

We've done enough thinking. Can't we just dance for a few years?

THE SHADOW BOX is a film with some very good actors (Plummer, Woodward)and directed by Paul Newman, about three terminally ill patients who spend their last days in an experimental retreat. Sounds corny? Well, it&#39;s not corny, but the biggest problem is that it&#39;s all too obvious that this is derived from a play. The actors do their best, but...well, they&#39;re just acting and not creating real-life characters. Paul Newman is a very good actor (understatement!), and I think he should stick to that. His direction is very sober, almost clinical and we don&#39;t get to care about these characters. And that&#39;s a real pity, given the premise. 6/10

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The Shadow Box

Paul Newman&#39;s directional central piece (his fourth, after almost eight years of silence) is, by far, the best American film of the decade. Not only for its very controlled, moving, unusual tone and rhythm, nor for the exceptional actors and actresses, but mainly for the treatment of such a theme like this, the easiest to fall into a stupid tear jerker. &quot;The shadow box&quot; is like Naruse Mikio&#39;s &quot;Midareru&quot;, the definitive proof that a great director (and Paul Newman is one of the best of his time) can make wonders with any argument, even with the most boring ones, the less &quot;important&quot;, even if the plot is tedious and the ending predictable. A gem

SB may seem very Newmanesque; exteriorly, it isanother clone of the disturbing stage plays that were fashionable in the &#39;50s and &#39;60sstageish, declamatory, rudimentary , sinister. Newman always confessed his fondness for such stage plays and for this trend; I haven&#39;t seen any of those on stage; on TV, they don&#39;t look well. Cheap philosophy, phony psychology, fake depths. In SB&#39;s case, I think that the play itself was bad. Several things can be enjoyed, and the movie is interesting; there are some performances that could be remarked (Mme Woodward, and also the poorer couplethese three actors are noteworthy). Stylistically, the film is crap, rubbish, TV garbageabsolutely no art, no artistic means, no subtlety, no modulationsno skill or craft whatsoeverit&#39;s brutally bad and primitive and clumsy. No scene is well made. No effort whatsoever was made to transfer the play from the stage on the screen. And this is annoying because it comes from a man that showed an unusual skill with the first movie he ever directed (&quot;Rachel &quot;). It looks like Newman was completely out of inspiration when he made this film. The absence of any art is conspicuous. The movie is involuntarily (I assume) and uselessly sexy, because Mrs. Woodward doesn&#39;t have a bra and one can see her _pokey nipples for most of her scenes. Very little,if any,is told by Newman through cinematic means;here he doesn&#39;t really uses the resources of his art.The film is sloppy and clumsy and it sounds fake. It&#39;s whole conception was phony, and this results in the film looking morbid and exploitative and melodramatic in the worst way . Newman can&#39;t really be excused, because he is the author of one of the best American movies ever (&quot; Rachel &quot;);but is &quot;Rachel &quot; was exquisitely crafted and minutely conceived and artistic throughout, &quot; SB&quot; is just sloppy and strident. I have seen 5 of the 6 movies that Newman directed; Rachel, Rachel (1968) ,his very first one,is,as I have already stated, a delicious masterpiece, impressive and exquisitely made; The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972) is averagealready not as good as the previous one;the psychological content is less well enunciated and delineated; The Glass Menagerie (1987) is very average; Harry &amp; Son (1984) is average at best, and very unappealing,as if Newman was becoming Eastwood ;while The Shadow Box (1980) is mere slapdash. As a matter of fact, the psychological investigation is absent, is inexistent in this film.

That&#39;s the request of the free spirited Joanne Woodward given to husband Christopher Plummer long before their divorce, one that he&#39;s finally taking seriously now that he&#39;s dying of cancer. It turns out that Plummer is lovers with the much younger Ben Masters who gets to meet the blunt and drunk Woodard who speaks to Masters in homophobic terms but is fascinated by the lifestyle she thinks of in perverted terms yet is aroused by it. This makes her tolerable and even likeable once you get past the urge to scream at her to shut up. Then there&#39;s the emotional denial that wife Valarie Harper has for the fact that husband James Broderick is also dying, not even telling their young son. This is nowhere near Rhoda Morgenstern for the awesome Harper, a sad element of the film considering what she went through in the last decade of her life. She&#39;s cheerful in a completely phony way one minute then furious out of the blue, even slapping her son suddenly. The elderly Sylvia Sidney is riveting as the rightfully angry woman dying and in typical Sidney fashion is cranky, yet suddenly scared and vulnerable, showing love to her daughter Melinda Dillon whom she bullies yet obviously adores. You recognize her immediately from modern Tim Burton cult classics, but there&#39;s also a flash of the troubled young heroine from 1930&#39;s like &quot;An American Tragedy&quot; and &quot;Fury&quot;. To think that she doesn&#39;t have the legendary status of Bette Davis (who greatly admired her) is astonishing to me. When she finds momentary joy in breaking into song, you&#39;ll be smiling through slight tears. She is sensational. I can see her in the role of the ailing art gallery in &quot;The Waverly Gallery&quot; that Woodward (who played her daughter in &quot;Summer Wishes, Summer Dreams&quot;) originally directed Eileen Heckart in, and was later beautifully revived with Elaine May. These three dying characters and their families are not characters you feel pity for as they aren&#39;t demanding it, just a chance for a dignified exit. To single any of them out as the best of the cast is impossible although as a huge fan of Sidney&#39;s, I could never look away and cherished every moment. The chemistry between Plummer and Woodward is also striking, and as exes who still love each other in a spiritual way is very touching. Under the direction of Paul Newman, this TV movie is a perfect example of the American theater put on the screen at its finest. This is the type of movie that makes you think, gives you tears and a few ironic laughs, and deserves to be rediscovered and acclaimed as a very human story that reminds us of the importance of the loved ones who come out of their way to support us in the darkest of times, knowing without us having to tell them that we need them as much as they need us.

As fine an actor as he was - and he was amongst the very top - Paul Newman was arguably a better director, perhaps because he was an actors director and could have probably extracted something resembling acting from even the most wooden - Laurence Harvey, John Gregson, Richard Todd et al. It&#39;s no surprise that he got a stunning performance out of his wife, Joanne Woodward, because he did so time and again - Rachel, Marigolds, Menagerie - but here he does the same with Valerie Harper playing a character a million miles away from &#39;Rhoda&#39; in the shape of a wife in denial of her husband&#39;s terminal illness. Yes, this is an adaptation of a play but the author of the prize-winning play did his own adaptation and the result is as sensitive as the original play. It&#39;s not, of course, for the bubblegum Multiplex set but that can only be a good thing. A very fine film.

User reviews

The Shadow Box

A staged play

THE BEST American FILM OF THE 80'S

Exteriorly a very Newmanish drama; in fact, a failure

We've done enough thinking. Can't we just dance for a few years?

Shadow And Substance

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