Naturally this makes the great dramatic actress-in her first screen role, which is stunning to consider-a wonderful comic foil for one of the funniest people in American comedy. And then there’s Glenn Close, who is doing the full Bonnie and Clyde on this movie as she plays Jenny Fields, a woman who has no sense of humor or a sense of why that humorlessness might be awkward for other people. It’s unrewarding work, giving him very little to do in terms of gaining applause or plaudits, and it’s about as close as one can get to watching Williams play the straight man. Robin Williams is charming, if basically unobtrusive, as Garp, which is exactly what the movie wants from him.
The kids are both giving good performances, especially Nathan Babcock, who plays Duncan with a certain older brother flair that mixes generosity with needling. Mary Beth Hurt plays Helen with a nerdy delicacy that is mostly her glasses but perhaps also in what appears to be a real physical frailness. In 2021 we’d never have John Lithgow playing Roberta Muldoon, but it’s hard to find anything about how he plays this trans woman which seems to be making fun of her. The World According to Garp is an adequate movie, anchored primarily through its performances. Regardless of what one knows about one, the other, or both, one’s preference for blood or lunacy is likely to dictate which one works better for you.īut enough about “is the book better than the movie,” a question that never does seem to have an interesting answer. The film chooses palpable blood the book, for all of its faults, chooses amiable lunacy. While on one side the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s unfold as we know them, with blood running palpably on the corner of Venus and Mars, on the other side there is still a whiff of amiable lunacy in the air. The story of Jenny and Garp and Helen derives a great deal of its richness from this suggestion of a world not far away from their own, one with bears in hostels and aging fortune tellers and unassuming hotel inspectors and their quaint families. The film version of The World According to Garp replaces “The Pension Grillparzer,” and as much as it makes this film significantly easier to approach, and makes this film significantly less ungainly as a streamlined story, it is a willing amputation of magic. I find this eminently understandable, because it is not a short story that makes a lot of sense, it has no real plot to speak of, and I can’t imagine trying to film it. It’s not in The World According to Garp, the movie. It’s presented clearly as the best of his work, the purest expression of him as a writer.
“The Pension Grillparzer” is the story in The World According to Garp, the novel, which changes Garp’s life. Starring Robin Williams, Glenn Close, Mary Beth Hurt
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