Unlived Lives

...Or Helen Mirren...

...You don't know what is happening, when or where or to whom, and what all the talk is about...

...Even more than in his meteoric career, the film revels in the sculptor's relationship with Sophie Brzeska, the tormented, much older Polish woman who became Henri's Platonic mistress and would-be incestuous mother figure...

...Are Middlemarch, Persuasion, Wuthering Heights less good Victorian novels than those written by male contemporaries...

...From Jordan Cronen-werth, his fashton-magazinish photographer...

...The catalogue of don'ts is delivered in stichomythic dialogue, with BZ smirkingly catechizing a pensively simpering Maria...

...And, as usual with Russell, the film becomes a torture chamber...

...an actress whose endowments surpass the Hottentot Venus, must strut in fulsome nudity along the great staircase of her marbled ancestral mansion...

...EquALLY absurd, if not more so, is Ken Russell's Savage Messiah, about that seminal sculptor, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who died in World War I at age 23...

...She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal...

...but without the satirist's wit, the moralist's vision, or the poet's transcendent grace to put mind and soul behind those eyes and ears...

...she reveals, to be sure, a perfect inner emptiness, but that, alas, is not acting...

...Such contradictions are not necessarily beyond the reconciling powers of art, but they do enhance the blatancy of claptrap...

...They are neither frail nor gushy, characteristics often thought of as feminine but actually simply bad...

...A solitary light shines out of this turgid mess: Dorothy Tutin's Sophie...

...Unfortunately, all this only makes Russell into a public nuisance, exactly as it is meant to, the unhappy director mistaking general obloquy for the hallmark of genius...

...Could an abortion really matter that much to a girl like Maria...

...Take a plainer example...

...When the novelist is inside Maria, recording her thoughts, the character seems moderately intelligent and sensitive, possibly Miss Didion herself...

...he is content with a passing parade of pseudonymous grotesques, as distasteful as they are unbelievable...

...In Christopher Logue, that overrated, modish poet, Russell has found a scenarist worthy of himself...

...He invents a scene where Henri and a non-Platonic mistress grossly copulate before a Sophie forced to watch with horrified fascination...

...but type-casting, Tuesday Weld's only strength, is not enough for Maria...

...When Maria, in the clutches of her neurosis, drives her sports car aimlessly and endlessly along the California freeways, our having to imagine this tentacular, pullulating inferno gives it a metaphysical dimension of sorts...

...At film's end, the institutionalized heroine smugly declares, "I know what 'nothing' means," a discovery Play It As It Lays is all too eager to share with the rest of us...

...Perry gets the art-film aura he so hotly pursues, and from Sidney Katz's editing, the bedeviling dislocation of Father Daedalus' maze along with the vertiginous hurtling of Son Icarus" fall...

...No good writer would permit such irreconcilable differences within a character, or such similarity between one character and all the others...

...Seeing the car, the traffic, the clover leaves with all the lights and signs, photographed once more (even in a soft nocturnal focus that gives them a nonobjective Moholy-Nagy look as in, say, Pierrot le Fou and Taking Off) demystifies the nightmare...

...Adam Roarke is as boring as the bits of his supposedly brilliant movies we are (unwisely) shown, and the others have scant chance of registering...

...As for "feminine" writing, it is a meaningless term to which I am tempted to apply the uncouth neologism "sexist...

...She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar's alone after midnight...

...That the society depicted is shallow and self-parodying is no excuse: The writer has to create more even when describing less...

...The film, with a script by Miss Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, is at an immediate disadvantage vis-a-vis the novel...

...S-M is explained, Abe Lipsey becomes "a store," and as the camera pans to the backs of our peripathetic philosophers, we see them walking into a resplendently breaking dawn...

...The verbal concentration is dissipated, the histrionic Technicolor and cutely colorful line readings rob the statement of even its spurious pathos...

...Miss Weld, a critics' darling, moves blandly, talks uninflectedly, and looks as blank as an unsigned check...

...And, of course, the titillating information about what distinguishes a superior swinger from a mere party girl: no easy pick-ups, orgies, kinky sex (except when the mood hits you), borrowed finery, drug traffic (as opposed to mere consumption) and, by way of poignant anticlimax, no public dandling of doll-like canines to assert one's regression into second girlhood...

...As for the concision, a device meant to increase the power of suggestion, it is wasted on characters not interesting enough to make us want to pursue their reverberations into the "meadows of margin" surrounding Miss Didion's sparse text...

...And could one, without knowing their authors, be sure that they were written by women...

...Miss Tutin finds the urchin under the spinster, the wounded soul within the megalomaniacal eccentric...

...Tony Perkins does all right by BZ, though one suspects type-casting rather than acting...

...This is yet another Russellian artist's biography in which the artist becomes a garish psychopath, and any resemblance to known facts is strictly coincidental...

...Frank Perry's direction strives sedulously for a chic, arty, complicated look and, unforlunately, succeeds in an endeavor where abstention would have been more honorable...

...She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills...

...What is wrong with a novel written by a woman from a female point of view—is it less human...

...This undercuts Miss Didion's third alleged virtue, her power of evocation: She is all good eye and ear...

...About Vorticism, the movement to which Gaudier and several other important figures belonged, Russell has little or nothing to say...

...Miss Didion's book was lauded especially for its extraordinary concision, its "un-feminine" toughness, and its evocative depiction of life and nonlife along the Hollywood-Vegas axis...

...Observed by the novelist from the outside, however, Maria becomes neurotic to the point of acute infantilism if not imbecility, and behaves like a particularly amoral amoeba...

...It has to anchor the elusive, vaguely suggestive effect of the laconic words in a specific, visually distracting place and an equally specific and limiting time, the duration of the film, which cannot, like printed paragraphs, be lingered over...

...In this homely, prissy, preposterous figure...

...If Miss Didion is "unfeminine" in any way, it is in the less than attractive sense of lacking sympathy for her characters, a defect I tend to think of (with inverse prejudice, perhaps) as more typically male...

...The performance glows like a jewel inside a pig's bladder...

...We are thus at a loss what to make of her heroine, Maria, a smalltime movie actress caught in the Hollywood whirl, divorced by her upward-mobile director husband, tormented by her inability to reach (both literally and figuratively) an autistic daughter confined to a sanatorium, and finally driven over the brink, it seems, by an abortion her then husband, who did not beget the fetus, forced upon her...

...If, on a joint visit to the Louvre, Henri impressed Sophie by doffing his hat to the Winged Victory, Russell has him shoutingly climb up on the statue to hurl defiances and be chased out of the museum by a passel of unfunny Keystone flics...

...and Scott Antony turns Gaudier into the brash scalawag Russell clearly demanded...

...Russell's notion of a sculptor is incessant hacking away with mallet and chisel, accompanied by breathlessly iconoclastic discoursing about Art and Lifea view parlaking in equal measure of Disneyland and Harper's Bazaar...

...As for motivations, you do not even presume to ask...

...In print, moreover, there is the sonorous fascination of proper names, the in-group cachet of knowing about the Sands and Lipsey's and that hip abbreviation for sadomasochism...

...Chapter 52 reads in its entirety: "Maria made a list of things she would never do...

...at the speed of film it is all bewildering pieces of a jig-saw puzzle dumped pellmell into your lap...

...The book can make use of such elliptic scenes in nonchronological order...

...At these times, though, she is not different from whichever other figure the author slips into...

...Well, one must at least concede some shrewdness to these observations, though I doubt if they deserve the italics lavished on them...

...With what veracity...

...Regrettably for him, even lack of genius can be reprehended—except, perhaps, in this wretched age whose every vacuous exhibitionist (Russell included) is loudly hailed as an innovator...

...There is, further, the provocative ambiguity of "unless she wanted to" and that curtly ominous "deal...

...The effect, such as it is, depends on, the expanse of white paper that surrounds this "chapter" and urges the reader to dwell on it in search of real or imaginary profundities...

...And why would children, autistic or aborted, seem to her so important if she can calmly watch her only friend commit suicide before her eyes...

...But on screen we see Maria and her ex-husband's producer, BZ, a suffering, self-destructive married homosexual and her best friend, strolling down a beach just before dawn...