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Bad Manners

1998, Movie, R, 90 mins

Bad Manners: Review

BAD MANNERS
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It's a little like WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, but without the drunken histrionics. Nancy (Bonnie Bedelia) is a tenured professor of musicology at a Cambridge, MA, university who's weathering a sexless marriage to Wes (David Strathairn), a bitter and sardonic Comparative Religion prof who's just been passed over for tenure. Arriving, then, at the worst possible moment is Matt (Saul Rubinek), Nancy's old grad school boyfriend, and his much-too-young girlfriend Kim (Caroleen Feeney), a smart and often inappropriately outspoken game theorist who likes to play with computers and other people's minds. Matt's convinced that he's stumbled across an honest-to-God miracle while conducting his own musicological research -- he's found two lines from Martin Luther's "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" buried deep within a piece of music randomly generated by a computer -- and he's in town to deliver the good word to his esteemed colleagues at Harvard. But after his first night as Nancy and Wes's guest, a $50 bill goes missing from Wes's wallet, and Kim immediately becomes suspect No. 1. Instead of confronting Kim directly, Wes does the worst possible thing, and what follows is a splendid and surprisingly suspenseful battle of minds and words: Highfalutin academic paradigms are used to mask petty grievances and suspicions as the characters tie themselves into knots all in the name of propriety, avoiding direct accusations and getting uncomfortable answers to questions they never meant to ask in the first place. The whole cast -- including a small but juicy bit by Julie Harris -- brings David Gilman's spiky dialogue (which he adapted from his play Ghost in the Machine) to a slow boil, but best of all is Bedelia: It's a rare treat to see this fine and consistently underrated actress sink her teeth into something a far sight more interesting than all those DIE HARD movies. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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