HARD-BITTEN yet soft-centred television reporter Gale Gayley (Geena Davis) is making her acceptance speech for the Silver Mike Award, made for devotion to truth in journalism. She produces an onion and starts whittling away at it, to illustrate the journalist's necessary task of digging beneath appearances, in search of a core that never shows up. Soon her face is awash with tears, onion tears, yes, but also unquestionably the tears of conscience, as she articulates her despair about human nature, her longing for a story that is not, ultimately, about weakness.
The elusiveness of onion anatomy has a long history as a model for human personality (famously in Peer Gynt) but this scene would make more sense, in the context of Stephen Frears' new film Accidental Hero (15), if Gale's investigative knife laid bare a tiny spine within the onion, a hidden vertebrate structure organising those crisp, eye-pricking layers.