![]() Or maybe the homophobia of our day? A cocaine addiction didn’t help. One assumes he encountered the racism of our day. Three years later he starred in Norman Jewison’s “A Soldier’s Story,” where I thought the same thing: star. He’s handsome as fuck, with large, expressive eyes and cheekbones you could cut glass on, and he embodies the rectitude and righteous anger of Doctorow’s character. ![]() When I first saw “Ragtime,” I assumed Howard E. And eventually Coalhouse, the father, shows up. When Sarah (Debbie Allen), the half-mad mother, is discovered nearby, the family takes her in as well. Here, she takes control in front of him, which, given the times, I don’t buy-particularly since she decides they should keep the baby. In the novel, Father is away on the Perry expedition so Mother is forced to make decisions on her own. They lose Mother, too, who is simply kind. “These niggers drop babies like rabbits,” says one official, and in the background, you can tell, they lose Mother’s Younger Brother, who is lonely, moody, and fairly progressive. After the police are called in, we get the racism of the day. Shortly after we’re introduced to the family-Father, Mother (Mary Steenburgen), Mother’s Younger Brother (Brad Dourif), and the boy (Max Nichols)-basically the narrator of the novel but a nonentity here-the family maid finds a Black baby crying in their garden in New Rochelle, NY. ![]() The second storyline, the main one, concerns the rise and fall of Coalhouse Walker, Jr. Nevertheless, in the film, Thaw demands its removal, White ignores him, and in June 1906, on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden, Thaw shoots White three times in the head. This is barely mentioned by Doctorow, and historically impossible, as that particular statue of Diana, by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, was unveiled in 1893, when Nesbit was 9 years old. ![]() The flashpoint in the movie is that White places a statue of Diana atop Madison Square Garden (1890-1925), which he designed, and rumors swirled that a naked Nesbit was the model. Doctorow describes him as having “the face of a ventriloquist’s dummy.” White was 30 years older than Nesbit, and he possibly drugged her for their first sexual encounter, but he’s generally regarded as a kind man. The murder was over a woman, of course, Nesbit, a model/chorus girl/actress who had originally been wooed by the superrich White and wound up married to Thaw, the scion of a coal and railroad baron. Newspapers called it the Crime of the Century, to which Doctorow reminds us “…it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.” Thaw of Pittsburgh (Robert Joy), which was huge news at the time. The first is the real-life murder of architect Stanford White (Norman Mailer) by Harry K. The movie mostly reduces Doctorow’s myriad storylines into two. It’s a good way to both introduce our most important character and include some historical figures. Rollins Jr.) plays piano to accompany newsreel footage. I like that, early on, Coalhouse Walker Jr. The depths of his Old Testament despair, with his hair and beard turning white, gets truncated, as does riding the trolleys to the end of the line-and there’s nothing at all on the 1912 Lawrence textile strike-so selling the picture book on an early morning in Philadelphia isn’t this glorious moment of redemption and release. The fictional Tateh (Mandy Patinkin) is also reduced. The best of her-the love she feels for Tateh’s daughter-is ignored for comic nude scenes and catty eye rolls. Evelyn Nesbit (Elizabeth McGovern) is expanded in terms of overall real estate but she’s reduced by becoming a shallow, comic figure. The storyline of Father (James Olson) accompanying Perry to the Pole is completely cut, which makes sense to me, since it seems superfluous. Morgan or Henry Ford, let alone Emma Goldman, while the Great Houdini is relegated to newsreel footage. It’s mostly historical characters that get glossed over. ![]() The novel is so sprawling in its use of fictional and historical characters, and so precise in its writerly voice, its ironic, class-conscious narrator skewering the age, that I don’t know how you’d get it all on screen. Doctorow’s “Ragtime”is one of my favorite novels, Milos Forman is one of my favorite directors (“Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Hair,” “Amadeus”), so it’s a shame Forman’s adaptation of Doctorow doesn’t quite work. It is never right to read movie reviews fast.Į.L. ![]()
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