abstract

“The subject matter of the play exists before the story and it is always something abstract,” Stoppard told the Paris Review in 1988.

He adapted their simple massing and abstract play of volumes, graced them with a few flourishes of Colonial detail, and served them up to young clients on Long Island and in coastal Massachusetts.

A large, gestural 1972 painting attested to a road not taken, while records of his sojourns in Europe and Africa revealed the influence of architecture on abstract structure.

As good as Teller is as a husband in crisis, the Oscar-winning Randolph is her own commanding source of light, enough to sell this movie’s feel-good abstracts and wry commentaries on her own.

A sense of charismatic presence — the material manifestation of an abstract idea — is inescapable.