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
