"I've got you, Garp!" -- click text to watch scene

"Glenn Close is more than a revelation...." -- Andrew Sarris

Andrew Sarris

“…. [Garp] took guts to make, and it avoided some extraordinarily dangerous traps, thanks largely to almost perfect casting in the key roles…. That [Williams'] Garp does not generate as much emotional electricity as he should may be due to the latent fear of audiences of having the dramatic rug pulled out from under them for the sake of an easy laugh.

“For the foregoing reasons and others, the movie tends to shift it concerns to the world of Jenny Garp [sic]. Glenn Close is more than a revelation in the role of Garp's militantly feminist mother. This comparatively unknown stage actress is so magically unfamiliar that the average viewer has not yet had time to detect the seams between her own personality and that of the character she plays….”

Andrew Sarris
Village Voice, July 27, 1982

Stephen Farber

“To my mind the greatest actresses have all made an indelible impression playing villainesses. Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and Angela Lansbury all relished their excursions into evil. Glenn Close is one of the only working actresses who has the potential to join the pantheon….

“Actresses who are willing to plunge into the heart of darkness usually have a strength and daring that enliven all of their performances. The same commanding authority that distinguishes Close’s sinister characters is also on exhibit when she plays more sympathetic roles—in Jagged Edge or The World According to Garp or Sarah, Plain and Tall. But by now, Close has shown an ability to play just about anything….

Stephen Farber
Movieline, November 1996, p 94

Stephen Schiff

“Hill has boasted of the special style he brought to this film; few scenes, he says, are more than 90 seconds long. Maybe that's why everything has such a compacted, freeze-dried feel. There's no porosity; [can't tell from my copy if this is semi-colon or colon] nothing sinks in. And that sort of atmosphere is murder on actors, because they need space and time to make their characters grow. It's terrible watching the fine New York stage performers in this movie slip and slide across Hill's icy surfaces. Glenn Close, a straight-forward, crisp-looking woman with a square jaw and an iron brow, is the most perfectly cast: as Jenny Fields, she has the right starchy integrity, and she makes everything she says sound epigrammatic; listening to her voice, you understand her rabble rousing charisma. And as Roberta Muldoon…, John Lithgow seems freer than anyone else in the picture….

Stephen Schiff
Boston Phoenix, date ?

David Denby

“….the sex-hating nurse, Jenny Fields (Glenn Close)—a limited, eccentric, but powerfully benevolent woman….”

“Theater actress Glenn Close, an imposing woman with an aristocratic nose and a sudden, surprsisingly generous smile, does much better with Jenny [than Williams does with Garp]. As written, Jenny is halfway between a joke and a saint; we don’t know how to take her, but at least Close makes her strong—she has the imperviousness, the distant benevolence to carry off this role of a woman who is sympathetic to bizarre human disasters but disgusted by normal human appetite….”

David Denby
New York, August 2, 1982

Pauline Kael

“….A straight-backed, narrow-minded maternal monstrosity, Jenny is also fearless and independent…. Jenny Fields never goes as far as carrying a scalpel, which the Jenny of the book does…, but metaphorically she's got a knife out, all right…. [Kael quotes a scene where Jenny catches a student hiding a porn magazine in Garp's crib: Jenny threatens to "inoculate his jock strap with bubonic plague" which will leave him with "nothing left even to scratch down there. Understand?"] This gets a laugh from the audience, of course, but it certainly doesn't help a viewer understand the film's later view of the humorless, threatening Jenny as a warm, compassionate woman….

“…. The novel has an antic tone and plenty of disguises, but it's a poison-pen letter to Mother and the feminist movement. And the film is even more transparent. Glenn Close's Jenny Fields has the burnished look, the well-scrubbed glow, of a Liv Ullmann: she radiates while the character constricts. Jenny holds everything in and remains unfazed, untouchable--Garp himself never seems able to get through to her. Glenn Close's line readings are reminiscent of Katharine Hepburn's cadences (filtered through Meryl Streep), but she has fine carriage for the role. She's unyielding. Uniformed for battle, her Jenny Fields is a warrior woman, Nurse Ratched as mother of us all. And that infernal glow of hers makes it impossible to judge whether at any given moment Garp loves her or hates her, or what the film director feels about her. She's a joke, she's a saint. Whatever she is, she's inhuman….

“How could the modern feminist movement, which is rooted in the sexual liberation of women, be inspired by a lust-fighter like Jenny (a woman who is grandly contemptuous of all sexual desire), except for the sly purposes of satire? Or the angry purposes of a writer swaddling his rage in trumps and tricks and reversals? It's when writers create straw men to attack that they expose what's bugging them, and Irving creates straw women: Garp's drillmaster mother and the Ellen Jamesians….”

Pauline Kael
New Yorker, August 23, 1982
Taking It All In, 377-80

Molly Haskell

“…. Glenn Close, a stage actress, makes a stunning debut as the determined nurse Jenny …. These three characters [including Garp and Helen] form a central triangle….

“As in the book, these forces are on a collision course, accelerated by the general craziness of the world around them, yet the movie has a kind of serenity that makes the violence even more shattering. Hill and Tesich have narrowed the focus of Irving’s novel—what else can one do with 600 pages—and concentrated on the family….

“…. [I]n truth, beneath the novel’s dazzling showmanship lie rather conservative messages; you can hear a wail for the erosion of family life and the threats to masculinity in the volcanic upheavals of the seventies.”

“Irving’s attitude toward the feminists is ambiguous….”

Molly Haskell
Playgirl, August 1982

notes

Glenn Close
The World According to Garp 1982


(Get Thomson, Newsweek, Canby?, etc)