The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond
May. 8th, 2018 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThere’s nothing wrong with The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond that throwing out half the script wouldn’t have fixed. Now on the one hand this may sound harsh, but on the other hand the script is by Tennessee Williams (written in 1957 but not filmed till 2009) and there are moments when you can just feel him taking a long pull on his whiskey, savoring the sentence of dialogue that he’s just written, the way he’s just really pinned the themes of the play and the psychological depths of the characters down to the page like a dead bug - and all of that would have been far better cut out.
There’s a particularly egregious moment where Fisher Willow (played by Bryce Dallas Howard, gamely giving it her all) delivers a soliloquy - there is no other word to describe this - with the camera close to her face, and a spotlight shining down on her, the whole background gone dark as if we’re in a theater. Now on the one hand, the lighting choices certainly accentuate everything wrong with the scene, but on the other hand I’m not sure that anything would have saved this.
But there are compensations. The actors really are giving their all, and in the moments where no one is talking, the visuals often achieve a stunning, off-kilter beauty. There’s a particularly lovely and unsettling scene when Fisher returns to a Halloween party after drinking a bottle of an opium-laced sleep aid either in hope of getting super high or committing suicide (it’s not clear she’s sure which one she’s aiming for), and in her absence everyone has put on costumes and masks and there’s a strange, slow, dreamlike quality as Fisher drifts through the uncanny crowd.
And then of course there’s Chris Evans in suspenders. (Full disclosure: I watched this movie because of a gif set of Chris Evans in suspenders.) Chris Evans in suspenders, speaking with a southern accent. He plays James Dobyne V, a young man of good lineage - his grandfather was the governor - but poor prospects, because his father’s drinking and his mother’s madness have decimated the family fortunes. Fisher basically hires him to serve as her escort for the season, which requires buying him multiple sets of evening clothes - oh yes, we also get Chris Evans in a tuxedo - and eventually proposes to him in the immortally unromantic words, “No one will ever love me… but you might get used to me!”
Jimmy Dobyne looks exactly as appalled as most people would upon receiving this proposal. He doesn’t particularly like Fisher: she likes to thinks she’s delightfully unconventional, when actually she has all the conventional snobbery without any of the conventional manners that might make that bearable. (“She works at a drug store!” she sneers about one of the Halloween party guests. And you just know Jimmy is thinking, I live in a shack, so what do you think of me?)
But he can’t bring himself to say no to her: she may be horrible but she’s also fragile. At the end of the movie he hasn’t accepted her proposal, but he hasn’t definitively turned it down either, and you get the feeling that she’ll browbeat him into this one too. “DON’T DO IT,” you want to yell at Jimmy, but… it’s Tennessee Williams. You know he’s gonna.
There’s a particularly egregious moment where Fisher Willow (played by Bryce Dallas Howard, gamely giving it her all) delivers a soliloquy - there is no other word to describe this - with the camera close to her face, and a spotlight shining down on her, the whole background gone dark as if we’re in a theater. Now on the one hand, the lighting choices certainly accentuate everything wrong with the scene, but on the other hand I’m not sure that anything would have saved this.
But there are compensations. The actors really are giving their all, and in the moments where no one is talking, the visuals often achieve a stunning, off-kilter beauty. There’s a particularly lovely and unsettling scene when Fisher returns to a Halloween party after drinking a bottle of an opium-laced sleep aid either in hope of getting super high or committing suicide (it’s not clear she’s sure which one she’s aiming for), and in her absence everyone has put on costumes and masks and there’s a strange, slow, dreamlike quality as Fisher drifts through the uncanny crowd.
And then of course there’s Chris Evans in suspenders. (Full disclosure: I watched this movie because of a gif set of Chris Evans in suspenders.) Chris Evans in suspenders, speaking with a southern accent. He plays James Dobyne V, a young man of good lineage - his grandfather was the governor - but poor prospects, because his father’s drinking and his mother’s madness have decimated the family fortunes. Fisher basically hires him to serve as her escort for the season, which requires buying him multiple sets of evening clothes - oh yes, we also get Chris Evans in a tuxedo - and eventually proposes to him in the immortally unromantic words, “No one will ever love me… but you might get used to me!”
Jimmy Dobyne looks exactly as appalled as most people would upon receiving this proposal. He doesn’t particularly like Fisher: she likes to thinks she’s delightfully unconventional, when actually she has all the conventional snobbery without any of the conventional manners that might make that bearable. (“She works at a drug store!” she sneers about one of the Halloween party guests. And you just know Jimmy is thinking, I live in a shack, so what do you think of me?)
But he can’t bring himself to say no to her: she may be horrible but she’s also fragile. At the end of the movie he hasn’t accepted her proposal, but he hasn’t definitively turned it down either, and you get the feeling that she’ll browbeat him into this one too. “DON’T DO IT,” you want to yell at Jimmy, but… it’s Tennessee Williams. You know he’s gonna.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-08 10:47 pm (UTC)....stuff like this is why I own dubious DVDs, like that one of The Covenant.
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Date: 2018-05-09 11:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-09 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-09 07:06 am (UTC)Who was it written for, in 1957?
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Date: 2018-05-09 11:42 am (UTC)In the future, when you have a question that probably could be answered by a resort to Wikipedia, how about you look it up yourself before you ask me?
no subject
Date: 2018-05-09 03:56 pm (UTC)The question I actually thought I'd left was "Who was it written for, in 1957? I'm wondering if the dialogue would have played less indulgently with actors accustomed to working with Williams," but only the first half seems to have posted and I didn't catch it before going to bed.
I was wondering about actors instead of directors. Wikipedia tells me Kazan had Julie Harris in mind for Fisher, but does not tell me who his James would have been.
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Date: 2018-05-10 11:03 pm (UTC)--I think so many iconoclasts are like this: they get rid of all the hampering parts of convention that keep people civil to one another. Delightful.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-11 03:19 am (UTC)But dispensing with surface politeness is so much easier than taking the time and energy and intellectual effort to actually excavate deeply engrained but questionable conventional values. And what if you go to all that effort and barely anyone even notices?