Directed by Jodie Markell
Run time: 102 min.
Who can forget Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire rushing into a man’s arms and exclaiming with desperate relief, “Sometimes there is God, so quickly”? Who will remember Bryce Dallas Howard reciting Tennessee Williams’ own variation on that epiphany in The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond? The variation—too good to repeat here—only lacks a comparable dramatic tone which isn’t Howard’s fault. Director Jodie Markell’s fidelity to Williams simply isn’t enough to makes his tropes sing.
Markell makes her brave but problematic directing debut with this script that Williams originally wrote as an Elia Kazan film project. She goes at it in a Playhouse ’90s way (stagey lighting cues, lots of close-ups) which should been safe but instead the film just feels old-fashioned. The script obviously needs reworking but Markell’s reverence embalms rather than intensifies. The romantic, indefatigable seeker Fisher Willow should have been fiery, a perfect role for Bryce Dallas Howard’s redhead ambitions, but Markell dulls her out by dyeing her hair brunet as if to literalize that Fisher Willow is a young Blanche DuBois.
For the sake of Williams’ poetry, still evident in this early-draft work, Howard carries one’s rooting interest but her actressyness seems remote from the American desperation Williams articulated. Sometimes she seems to be doing Fitzgerald’s Bernice Bobs Her Hair (which Joan Micklin Silver already filmed with Shelly Duvall in 1976)—a class-status comedy rather than an erotic, moral sojourn. As Jimmy Dobyne the gentleman caller, Chris Evans is a greater love object, with his Monty Clift gaze and Gregory Peck bearing. But Evans also plays the class angle rather than erotic profundity, although he achieved both in Hunter Richards’ little-seen drama London.
These filmmakers seem uncomfortable with the beauty and power of Williams’ vision—a homegrown version of Ophuls’ Earrings of Madame De where lost jewelry becomes convincing symbology: Earrings equal poison equals pity, mercy equals release, love equals salvation. A lack of conviction rather than talent may explain the film’s flaws, no doubt related to the utter cynicism that predominates our facetious Up in the Air culture where Fisher Willow, Jimmy Dobyne, old Miss Addie (Ellen Burstyn) and even Blanche DuBois seem like rubes rather than our soulful surrogates, But this romantic search for epiphany is worth seeing. It has Williams’ bold truths (“You don’t love me but you’ll get used to me”) and his lyrical courage: “Isn‘t it kind of silly?” Fisher Willow asks about a kissing game and a debutante replies “No more than life is.”
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