gavin6942 Martha Horgan, a naive woman with an intellectual impairment who lives with her aunt Frances in a small town, is known for always telling the truth. She works at a dry cleaner, where her compulsive truth-telling leads her to report to the boss that another employee has been stealing from the cash register.Janet Maslin wrote, "A Dangerous Woman is soap opera... With Ms. Winger's eerily convincing performance as its centerpiece, the film creates a world of sexual chicanery that would do any television series proud... The film has been given an appealingly languid and intimate mood by the director, Stephen Gyllenhaal." This is pretty much it. Winger does a fine job in the lead role, but she seems to be too good for the movie they have put her in. The plot is not very exciting, and once we get to a point where it has potential everything is already winding down. Gabriel Byrne is a good actor, but does not seem to be really giving much effort here. Did this have a theatrical release? It seems more like a made-for-cable movie.

Irishchatter Seriously, I thought it was just gonna be about a nerdy woman who just wants to get on with life as does the rest of us!Instead there was too many stupid scene's, it was always concentrating on her neighbors who do a lot of crime.No wonder she began to become a screwball in the end, everyone was turning into circus animals.I had to even skip a few scenes because some of it was just too long and boring. Man, I haven't seen any fun watching this, I'm probably gonna have nightmares about this movie, it is just terrible!I wish to be given this a 0 rating as it deserves nothing!

James Hitchcock It is sometimes said that the best way to win an Oscar is to play someone with a disability, whether physical or mental, and this certainly seemed to be true in the late eighties and early nineties. Several "Best Actor" and "Best Actress" awards during this period went to those playing such parts- Marlee Matlin in "Children of a Lesser God", Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man", Daniel Day-Lewis in "My Left Foot" and Tom Hanks in "Forrest Gump". "A Dangerous Woman" was perhaps Debra Winger's attempt at Oscar glory, as her character, Martha, is retarded, possibly mentally handicapped.The exact nature of Martha's disability is never made clear in the film, indeed, it is pointed out that the doctors are unable to diagnose her, let alone cure her. She is simple-minded, but her condition does not require her to be hospitalised (she lives with her aunt Frances) and she is even able to hold down a job with a dry-cleaning company. In the event, Winger was not nominated for an Oscar, although she did receive a nomination for a Golden Globe, but her performance is nevertheless a very good one. In some of her earlier films she played attractive, lively, vivacious characters, but Martha is plain, slow and shuffling, dowdily dressed, peering at the world through thick pebble glasses. Although Frances is supposed to be a generation older than Martha (and Barbara Hershey, who plays her, is seven years older than Winger), it is Frances who seems considerably younger.Despite her mental disability, however, Martha does not lack a sense of right and wrong. Indeed, her sense of right and wrong is very highly developed. She is incapable of being deceitful or dishonest, even when it would be in her own interests to be so. (There is a suggestion, not completely followed through, that in a dishonest society an inability to dissemble or tell lies is in itself a form of mental handicap). Martha loses her job at the dry-cleaners; the ostensible reason is that she is suspected of stealing money from the till (a theft actually carried out by one of her colleagues), but the real reason is that she embarrassed her boss by telling a customer that his suit had not been properly cleaned.Apart from the scenes where Martha loses her job, the main focus is on the growing romance between Martha and Mackey, the Irish handyman carrying out repairs to Frances's house. There is also a rather unnecessary subplot about Frances's own affair with a local politician and the attempts to reclaim him made by the man's estranged wife. Although Mackey has a serious drink problem and little positive about him, Martha becomes very attached to him, and allows him to take advantage of her when he is drunk. (Drunkenness is a common theme in the film; Frances and the politician's wife also have alcohol problems).The crisis of the film comes when Martha is molested by Getso, the employee whose dishonesty was the ostensible reason for her sacking, and she stabs him in self-defence, with fatal results. Martha is urged to claim that Getso was attempting to rape her, but refuses on the grounds that this would be a lie. Martha's devastating honesty makes her a "dangerous woman" to herself; her inability to lie puts her in danger of a conviction for murder. It is, in fact, never clear exactly what Getso was attempting to do; the film certainly leaves open the possibility that he was indeed trying to sexually assault Martha but that she was too innocent to realise this.For most of the film, the action is fairly slow-moving. The film is not only slow but also sombre; many scenes are dark, with dull browns and greys the predominant tones. The crisis comes near the end, which means that the film can seem rather unbalanced- a long, unhurried build-up followed by a hurried ending. Nevertheless, Winger's affecting performance makes this a film worth seeing as an insight into the problems of the mentally handicapped. 6/10

Robert J. Maxwell There isn't much new in the idea. Two women, both hungry, living alone. A handyman comes in. He does both of them. One, in the course of an unrelated subplot, knifes a man to death and is sent to jail, carrying the handyman's baby. After a year or so, she gets out and is reunited with the handyman, her baby, and the other woman -- happily, it seems. Yet the plot is more original than you might expect. What you might expect is a pretty but excessively shy woman who finds love at the end with the humble Mellors, I mean the humble Byrne. But it's not that. It's not "David and Lisa" either. It's better than that.What I kind of like about it is mostly the acting. Barbara Hershey is glamorized and stunning. And Debra Winger gives her character a real life of her own. Man, is she homely. She wears thick glasses, has her hair tied back like the head of a mop, wears no makeup, and pinches her lips together and twitches from time to time. It's the kind of performance -- playing an inadequate socially challenged semi-loony -- that wins Academy Awards. At the same time it's more difficult to play a person with a touch of simple schizophrenia than it is to play an autistic or someone who has cerebral palsy or is considerably retarded. Winger's unadorned illness is characterized mainly by an inability to groom herself attractively and a social clumsiness that is characteristic of schizophrenia. What she has, and what most schizophrenics don't, is an emotional depth, a resonance with others. She may be constantly frazzled but she's capable of loving deeply.And I appreciated Gabriel Byrne's character and performance too. A by-the-numbers route here would have brought in a ruggedly handsome, perfectly gorgeous, virile, flawless guy, brimming with danger and testosterone. Instead the movie gives us Gabe Byrne. Yes, he's a kind of ne'er do well and a rogue but he's not Vigo Mortenson or Brad Pitt. His face looks as if it's been molded out of candle wax that has begun to melt. He gets drunk just about every night and can't hold a job. He admits he's a lying thief. And -- for this I was particularly grateful -- he never ONCE takes off his shirt and shows us his sweaty chest while splitting logs or, er, plowing a field.One night, drunk, he stumbles into Winger's little bungalow. He's filled with remorse, poses her as a priest in a confessional, asks her, "Are you Catholic? Ah, never mind, you don't know what the **** I'm talking about anyway." Then he begs this rudely shaped lump of clay for absolution and weeps in her lap before kissing her. (Her first time, we don't doubt.) She's alternately charmed and horrified.The language and the sex are fairly explicit. The sex includes masturbation, defloration, and -- well, normal intercourse, I guess, if the definition is extended to include coupling on a floor full of broken crockery with one of the partners so deliriously drunk that she believes the man is someone else.It's nicely directed too. No razzle-dazzle. No, "Hey, Ma, look at me! I got a camera!" Just one or two shots involving a pair of eyeglasses draw attention to themselves. The rest is very efficiently done. When Strathairn dies, he does so in a most unexpected way, stabbed multiple times, and whining about, "Hey, what did you do to me." There's blood all over the place, as there should be when someone is bleeding to death, but not a single shot of a knife piercing flesh. And his killer reassuring him as he expires, "It's okay. It's okay." She can't dial 911 because she can't find her glasses.The end is a little disturbing if you bother to think about it. After all, Debra Winger has stabbed a guy to death over some squabble at her workplace. "A Dangerous Woman" is right. And it appears that Byrne is finally going to make an honest woman out of her. I hope she never gets mad at HIM.The photography is very nicely done. I don't know where it was shot but it looks a bit like the Coachella Valley in California. Nice ranch house. Nice lines of fruit-bearing trees in the orchards. Mountains all around. Fan palms. The Garden of Eden with humans in it.