Screen
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN ANOTHER WASTELAND 'TOM & VIV' Walking out of the theater exhibiting Tom and Viv, the film about the unhappy union of T.S. Eliot and Vivien Haigh-Wood, I entertained a strange fantasy...
...There's nowhere for her to go with her performance once our heroine unravels...
...And her outbursts have all the high decibel fury Richardson always has at her command...
...Turning from wife to husband and back again, the marital mediator bestows his goodwill with perfect equity and censures no one...
...Trouble is, that's all she's called upon to deliver...
...Yet he not only stuck by her but showed her the greatest affection until his love ceased...
...Your marriage may be over but your lives are not...
...We are instead offered the titillations of crazy antics: Vivien trying to break into Eliot's publishing offices and pouring liquid chocolate through the keyhole when she's locked out...
...But easy explanations abound in Tom and Viv, abetted by glib dialogue, routine plot development, and plush, mostly bland direction...
...Envision, please, a marriage counselor, moistly sympathetic in mien and possessing the most soothing of voices, seated at his desk and gravely listening to the woes of his latest clients...
...But never fear...
...But Willem Dafoe's plight is worse than Richardson's...
...To please some effete types who spend their time "writing nasty novels about their friends," Eliot has thrown his wife to the psychiatric wolves...
...But, according to the film, when Vivien recovers her sanity after menopause (the hormonal problem having abated), there is no husband around to effect her release, for Eliot has refused to visit her for years...
...Vivien's slide into madness isn't just quick, it's precipitous, accomplished by the filmmakers mere minutes after the wedding-night scene...
...Nothing can be done but no one is to blame," the counselor intones...
...Vivien brandishing a knife at Virginia Woolf, etc., etc...
...Miranda Richardson's specialties-brittle playfulness, barely leashed hysteria, feminist outrage-are all called for here, but with a vengeance, too much of a vengeance...
...Their sad story told, the two sit in a state of near-collapse and await professional judgment...
...At the (virtual) last minute a villain is found on whom the audience can fasten as the source of the woe that is this marriage...
...Pritchett called the poet "a company of actors inside one suit, each twitting the others...
...Furthermore, Eliot must have been conscious of Bloomsbury's scorn for Vivien years before the break-up...
...SCREEN ANOTHER WASTELAND 'TOM & VIV' Walking out of the theater exhibiting Tom and Viv, the film about the unhappy union of T.S...
...It comes out in a scene between Eliot and Viv's mother, the latter presented by both script and actress Rosemary Harris as a paragon of compassion and clear-sightedness...
...This cruel abandonment is the sin for which the moviemakers indict Eliot...
...Eliot and Vivien Haigh-Wood, I entertained a strange fantasy which I shall now inflict on you...
...After the usual guilty reassurances-"I know I can make you happy," "Please...
...I'm not blaming you," etc., etc.-he leaves for a walk but pauses to lean on the other side of the door in baffled longing...
...the director cuts to Vivien crouching inside, equally longing...
...And why did it cease...
...Bloomsbury- though hardly the cultural establishment-was certainly snobbish and cliquish, but the portrayal here of Virginia Woolf as a sort of Margaret Dumont matron betrays a vulgarity that condemns itself...
...It's not his fault that the script gives his talent no scope...
...The first quarter of the movie, though not really gripping, is amiable, promising, attractive...
...Well, that's Tom and Viv for you...
...Nobody in the film, including Vivien's doctors, can understand the basis of her mental instability since it simply hadn't been discovered yet...
...I may have heard a feeble protest pass Willem Dafoe's lips at this moment, but I don't really think so...
...The clients, a bit stupefied, perhaps, by such illimitable empathy, arise and turn to exit...
...Though Dafoe was last seen machine-gunning his foes in the excellent espionage thriller, A Clear and Present Danger, he here conveys quite deftly both the fragility of Eliot's physique and the powerfully grinding mill of his mind...
...The poet was as complex a man as ever lived, and his torment must have been the most complex thing about him...
...Richardson is masterly as she taunts her husband and parents at dinner, peering over her plate at her victims like a demented crane...
...Dafoe's charming reserve and Richardson's equally engaging skittishness make us want to follow this couple as they seek out a life together...
...In real life, it wasn't Eliot who committed his wife...
...Alas, nearly the last one in the movie...
...Forster...
...Haigh-Wood always to stand by her daughter...
...Haigh-Wood seems to be speaking for the moviemakers...
...Suddenly, the counselor leaps over his desk and plunges his letter opener in the husband's back...
...monotony would not have doused Dafoe's performance...
...Its writers, Michael Hastings and Adrian Hodges (adapting Hastings's play), proceed for some time as if they were treating both participants in a conjugal catastrophe with equal compassion, but all the while they're sharpening their knives to skin Old Possum...
...Haigh-Wood, presenting herself and her family as the cream of England's gentry, exposes Eliot as a calculating American snob breaking into England's cultural establishment...
...The casting of Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson in the leads works quite well at the start...
...No one can be blamed in these calamitous unions of incompatibles...
...But no judgment comes, only all-embracing sympathy...
...As it is, Vivien flails, Tom quails, and the audience is left stranded...
...Go from this office into your futures, and take with you my assurance that for all the arguments, the public embarrassments and flights of madness you have inflicted on each other, I have heard the unmistakable note of mutual love...
...friends" hardly describes the productions of Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, or E.M...
...RICHARD ALLEVA...
...The entire scene is sheer philistine fudge...
...How do the moviemakers tardily, hastily, and unmistakably indict him...
...The camera moves through their hotel bedroom, pans over hastily cast-off garments, then freezes at the sight of Eliot gazing dejectedly out a window...
...In the last twenty minutes, however, the scriptwriters, as if awakening to the pointlessness of their work, try to recharge their project with the adrenaline of blame...
...Exulting over the corpse, he grins at the shocked wife, "Something you should have done a long time ago, deary...
...And "nasty novels about...
...Tom and Viv manages the almost impossible feat of being sedate, confused, and malign-all at once...
...Eliot certainly isn't to blame for putting his wife in a comfortable place (more of a health spa, as shown here, than an asylum) where she can receive, if not a cure, then at least the sort of care he can't give her...
...Once those Bloomsbury types got ahold of you," she claims that he ceased being the sort of man who would keep the promise he made to Mrs...
...But that possibility isn't pursued...
...Terrible things may be in store for them, but the quality of the acting promises some revelations about human nature in extremis...
...And, of course, that villain, in our age of pedestal pulverization, has got to be T.S...
...Unless a writer or director can get inside madness and illuminate that awful terrain (as Shakespeare did in Lear or Ingmar Bergman did in Persona), insanity on stage or screen is nothing but a freak show...
...There is no villain here, only two admirable, inevitable victims...
...If the filmmakers had really been attuned to Eliot, really curious about the many-sided spirit that dwelt behind his detached demeanor (V.S...
...At one point, Vivien confesses that sometimes she can hear the craziness of what she says, and that interesting remark suggests an aspect of their heroine that the filmmakers might have explored: pent-up sanity watching unleashed dementia within the same psyche...
...She denounces Eliot for his connections to Bloomsbury...
...When the young scholar-poet looks out of a classroom window to gaze lovingly at the flapper Vivien hailing him from a moving car, we understand quite well the mutual attraction of these opposites...
...It's an affecting moment...
...She, at least, can show some flash and fire, but Dafoe, after a good start, is allowed only to slump, drone, and look baleful...
...To find a real, coherent story in the dissolution of this marriage, the moviemakers would have had to be the sort of artists who never settle for easy explanations...
...And what do they adduce as Eliot's motive for such cruelty...
...Nobody really knows...
...As we follow the marriage deeper and deeper into misery, we seem to be pushed further and further back from the characters...
...And the beginning of their woes, a wedding night wrecked by her hormonal imbalance and his revulsion-induced impotence, is staged by director Brian Gilbert with an economy that is both tactful and powerful...
...And, the way the scene is written and played, Mrs...
Vol. 122 • January 1995 • No. 2
