by Julian Wood
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Gillian Anderson, Vanessa Kirby, Ben Foster
Intro:
… bold in conception.
Quintessentially American playwright Tennessee Williams lived a life as tempestuous and tragic as many of his memorable characters. In Blanche Dubois, he crafted one of the great female roles in modern theatre and her much-quoted line “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” sums up something eternal about both our essential interdependence and the weakness that underlies those who cannot stand on their own two feet.
This filmed revival from London at the Young Vic theatre features, suitably enough, an American in the lead role. Gillian Anderson (seen recently in The Salt Path) has long term connections to the UK and has always been drawn to the London stage. There is a feeling, for some at least, that this is the summit and the true test of one’s acting chops. It can also be a big risk if the screen technique (to say nothing of the way endless takes can correct mistakes) does not produce demonstrable theatrical competence. Anderson is mostly pretty good here, but she struggles a little towards the end of the play when she occasionally risks bathos rather than pathos by overdoing the smudged makeup and wide-eyed alcoholic confusion of Blanche in her decline.
Australian director Benedict Andrews (Una, Seberg) has put his own original stamp on the very familiar play. The production is bold in conception. The New Orleans house of Blanche’s sister Stella Kowalski is here rendered by ‘rooms’ demarcated only by chairs and sinks and baths etc, but no walls. There is nowhere to hide and that is kind of the point. It is plonked in the middle of the audience, so that we can see past the actors to the faces of those at the performance that night, but you have to ignore that distraction. The camera does not prowl around the action, but it is impossible to film in a flat static proscenium arch with this kind of set up. As implied, the fact that the action is surrounded like this, does intensify the goldfish bowl effect. We cannot help but pry into their domestic tragedy and see the family come apart before our pitying eyes.
The play is very long and at times feels it. However, the domesticity is all part of it, so we need to see how Stella and her husband Stanley (Ben Foster) and Blanche rub along and against each other. Part of the point is that Blanche very soon outstays her welcome and the lack of privacy is well served by the theatrical device alluded to above. Vanessa Kirby (so good as Princess Margaret in The Crown) makes us care for Stella as a woman who can only shield her sister or please her husband but not do both at the same time. Foster as the resentful Stanley has the showier role, and he brings convincing menace especially to the emotionally raw scenes that today would be described as domestic violence. But it is Blanche/Anderson’s play and she really throws herself into it, complete with her arch Southern drawl and irritating airs and graces. She has to play drunk a lot of the time, which is not as easy as it sounds. It is possible to be both a little contemptuous of Blanche’s pretensions and simultaneously moved to pity by her vulnerability, which is a testament to Williams’ enduring dialogue and skilful play writing.
