Monthly Archives: November 2015

  • Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mike Nichols (1966)

    For the first forty-five minutes or so – in other words, the first act – Mike Nichols’s first (and still his best) film is ideal theatre.   That is to say:  the acting style is a kind of super-defined naturalism, the delineation of character is bracingly sharp, the four people are essentially (and the physical setting actually) believable.  At the same time, you’re always intensely aware that the performers are acting, and that the acerbic dialogue (adapted from Edward Albee’s play by Ernest Lehman) is heightened beyond realism.  Part of the pleasure of watching the actors and listening to the lines – a pleasure that I’ve never experienced to anything like the same degree watching any stage play – derives from your awareness of this extremely skilful artificiality.  Nichols achieves momentum almost instantaneously and sustains it through the cast’s dynamic.  The tension in the relationships between George, Martha, Nick and Honey is completely fused with the tension in the high-wire performances of Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal and Sandy Dennis.  Mike Nichols’s decision to create linking entr’acte sequences makes good dramatic sense too.  You almost need these short equivalents of theatre intervals to break the tension and to allow you to absorb what you’ve been watching.  From the start of the second act, Nichols opens out the action and reduces the tension a little too much – some of the amazing pressure of that opening begins to dissipate.  But not enough to detract seriously from the film:  all in all (and all the time the action is happening inside George and Martha’s house), this is the one of the most satisfying screen adaptations of a theatre work that I know.

    Virginia Woolf is set in a New England grove of academe.  Martha is the daughter of the college president; her historian husband George, although well into middle age, is still only an associate professor.  The couple return home after an evening at a drinks party elsewhere on the campus.  They’ve invited a younger couple, a biology professor and his wife, back for a nightcap.  Martha and George have a love-hate relationship with the hate more usually to the fore.  They carry on drinking and, to quote Wikipedia:

    ‘… engage in relentless, scathing verbal and sometimes physical abuse in front of Nick and Honey. The younger couple are simultaneously fascinated and embarrassed. They stay even though the abuse turns periodically towards them as well.’

    There are a few things I’m not keen on in the Albee material.  George and Martha’s invention of a son is eventually misleading in that it seems to imply that the state of their relationship is something to do with being childless.  It seems doubtful that the two lead characters weren’t named for the first American president and first lady yet the connection between the latterday George and Martha and the Washingtons seems emptily clever and is certainly unilluminating.  But Albee is masterly in dramatising how drink allows people to dare to throw off and penetrate the façade of civilised sobriety while at the same time giving them new opportunities for escape from reality. The Virginia Woolf/big, bad wolf of the story is a world without illusions – hence Martha’s final admission, in answer to the titular question, that ‘I am, George, I am’.

    Under Nichols’s direction, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton succeed completely in giving the excoriating exchanges between Martha and George both enormous zest and a sense that these are practised routines; we can suspect but can’t be sure that things go considerably further in the course of this ‘Walpurgisnacht’ (the title of the second act) than usual.  Not all the wonder of the acting is in the hostilities:  Burton and Taylor are eloquent even in their short, late-night walk back home in the opening credit sequence.  They also make us see that Martha and George are, insofar as two egocentric people can be, an antagonistically devoted couple.  They couldn’t live without each other.

    Burton (in his fortieth year when the film was made) gives by far the finest screen performance I’ve seen from him.  His character is very convincing as a particular type of academic:  condescending towards Nick when George is confident he’s got the intellectual upper hand; then exaggerating his ignorance of science as both an expression of contempt for the younger man’s domain and as a means of self-protection.    Burton is wonderful showing that George is amused by his own cleverness and oppressed by its futility.   Even when he’s at his most verbally devastating, you sense the underlying sense of defeat and hear George’s wit turning to ashes in his mouth, especially when he’s standing up or talking down to Martha.   Quite how the college president’s daughter grew into this termagant is something of a poser, and one that Edward Albee alone can answer, but Elizabeth Taylor (who was only thirty-four at the time) is so great in the role that you suspend disbelief.  Not only that:  Taylor convinces you that Martha knows her capacity for strident coarseness, and for pushing it for all its worth, is one of her strongest weapons – a reliable way of humiliating her husband.  I don’t know of many film performances that combine serious and comic elements as brilliantly and enjoyably as this one.   While we’re clearly not supposed to think that Nick and Honey will, in the fullness of time and marriage, turn into George and Martha, the younger wife is a kind of trainee in the boozing department – she can’t hold her drink anything like as successfully as her elders.   Hers may be the most limited characterisation but Sandy Dennis’s mannered neuroticism makes for a spectacular and gripping show.   The role of Nick (who is never named in the dialogue) yields fewer obvious rewards for the actor playing it but George Segal does extremely well:  it’s a tribute to his penetration and subtlety that, while Nick’s situation might seem to invite sympathy, he remains dislikeable.

    Setting the piece within a university community could be seen to reflect a rather crude anti-academic prejudice (those-who-can’t-teach and all that).  Nevertheless, Virginia Woolf illustrates very remarkably the extent to which professional wordsmiths have a natural propensity for using what they say as a means of hurting, and as a means of defence as well as attack.  Albee has been quoted as saying that he saw the words of the title scrawled in soap on a bathroom mirror and that ‘it did strike me as being a rather typical, university intellectual joke’.  (According to Wikipedia, he also asked Leonard Woolf for permission to use the phrase.  It isn’t explicitly clear what the response was; one can only assume that Wikipedia’s silence on the point means Woolf’s consent.)

    Academy Awards for Best Actress (Taylor) and Supporting Actress (Dennis) and – in the last year before the monochrome and colour categories were finally merged – for black-and-white cinematography (Haskell Wexler), art direction (Richard Sylbert, George Hopkins) and costume design (Irene Sharaff).

    17 August 2009

  • Away From Her

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sarah Polley (2006)

    In the space of a short story, Alice Munro is able to capture a whole life or the progress of relationships that last a lifetime.  She handles the passage of time in a way I have to call magical because I can’t see the techniques that are being used to create the effects.  Away From Her, which Sarah Polley adapted from Munro’s story The Bear Came Over the Mountain, contains a fine performance from Julie Christie as a woman with Alzheimer’s but it doesn’t reproduce the virtues of Munro’s writing and it’s not really very good, although I kept wanting it to be.  You’d never think of an Alice Munro story thin but Away From Her feels as if there’s not enough material to sustain a feature-length movie.  Polley’s sensitive approach may be one of the problems – the story is more disturbing and has much more friction than the film.  Fiona Anderson (Christie) realises that she’s reached the point where she needs full-time care; she’s more willing to face up to the prospect than her husband, Grant (Gordon Pinsent), a retired academic.   The Andersons, who live in Brant County, Ontario, have been married many years, although Grant has been unfaithful with female students during that time.  The couple’s worlds appear to revolve around each other – there’s no evidence of any children or other family.  The rules of the nursing home where Fiona goes to live require an initial thirty-day ‘settling in’ period, during which new residents are not allowed any visitors.  By the time Grant comes to see Fiona after this enforced separation, she’s developed an attachment to another patient, a man called Aubrey (Michael Murphy).   Away From Her is about a man losing his wife, in effect, twice.  And Grant comes to believe, in some part of his mind, that Fiona, though she seemed affably tolerant of his affairs at the time, is, in some part of what remains of her mind, getting her own back.

    At first, Away From Her comes across as rather a generic treatment of an Alzheimer’s sufferer and her partner – a montage of moments of embarrassing or upsetting or unknowing forgetfulness, accompanied by Jonathan Goldsmith’s wan music.   A short dinner-party sequence suggests how Fiona’s Alzheimer’s is eroding the Andersons’ social life but Sarah Polley doesn’t attempt to give any sense of the relentless and abrading quality of the domestic routine, which must be one of the most upsetting things for a partner – finding not only that the person you love is disappearing but that love is increasingly displaced by feelings of irritation.  Although he gives a skilful and intelligent performance, Gordon Pinsent isn’t that strong a personality on screen and he’s on screen for more time than anyone in the film.  Grant Anderson isn’t a likeable man more because Pinsent is somewhat closed off than through his communicating the man’s selfishness.   By contrast, Olympia Dukakis, as Aubrey’s wife Marian, whom Grant visits and with whom he eventually has a short-lived sexual relationship, always seems eager to do more than the script allows.   A sensitive but plain-speaking care worker called Kristy (Kristen Thomsen) is an example of a character who, although minor in terms of how much she’s given to say, registers strongly in the hands of Alice Munro but who is stretched thin in Polley’s adaptation.  Wendy Crewson, as the superintendent of the nursing home, overdoes smiley businesslike insensitivity.

    In the end, Away From Her is worth seeing only for Julie Christie – but she really is worth seeing.   Christie has always been much more impressive to watch than to listen to on screen:  this pays dividends here in more ways than one.  The discontinuity of Fiona’s mind means there are rarely too many lines for Christie to handle; she realises Fiona’s erratic thought processes, and the words and looks that reflect them, with piercing precision.  Her eyes express shock as well as sadness:  Fiona knows that a large part of her has been burgled.  The snow-covered Ontario landscapes, in combination with Christie’s apprehension of vacancy, recall the closing couplet of Philip Larkin’s ‘The Winter Palace’:

    ‘Then there will be nothing I know.

    My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.’

    Julie Christie is still amazingly beautiful but there’s a poignancy seeing her in this role for a film lover of my generation, for whom she has always been there.  The actress (Stacey LaBerge) who appears as the young Fiona, as glimpsed in Grant’s memory, not only lacks the ‘spark of life’ which he remembers about the girl who became his wife.  She seems entirely redundant for anyone who can call to mind the young Julie Christie.

    19 August 2012

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