Miniature

Charley Parkes (Robert Duval) is a very passive, withdrawn and insular man in his thirties who gets dismissed from his job for being a 'square peg'. Charley spends hours looking at a doll's house in a museum and starts to fall in love with a female 19th century miniature of a young woman.

Robert Duval is brilliant, playing the character with fine judgment and great consistency, but the story is much too silly and predictable. It is testament to his ability as an actor that Duval could make this watchable, because with his consummate performance all the quaintness of the story seems in some ways justified. The reality of his characterization makes this, for me, a genuinely sad tale. Nowhere else in the Zone is such a serious character put in such a ridiculous scenario.