ponderousness

Big-screen enterprises, particularly those adapted from books with a huge, fiercely loyal readership, often have a ponderousness built in to every image.

Thornton Wilder, whose “Our Town” is the most famous dramatic inheritor of Winesburg’s legacy, cautioned in his stage directions that the play “should be performed without sentimentality or ponderousness — simply, dryly and sincerely.”

Its elegiac pacing and atmosphere convey the ponderousness of the nation’s losses at that moment.

The ponderousness of the picture signals itself almost every minute “Freddy’s” illuminates the screen.

But any such pretensions are kept in check here, as is the ponderousness and sentimentality that often afflict such exercises in mythmaking.