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Tom and VivRating:
Release Date: 08 April, 2003 Retail Price: $14.99 OUR Price: $13.99 You SAVE: $1.00! Cast: Complete Cast (8 total) |
Tom and Viv Reviews
Etherized
What a strange little movie. First: Willem Dafoe as T.S. Eliot. Way too physical and intense, too New York, to make a convincing Eliot. At 39, he's too old for the young Eliot at the beginning and too young for the weary wartime Eliot we see at the end. Yet stick with it, the pacing and intonation (carefully cribbed from recordings of Eliot's readings) gain power over time. By the end I almost believed. But not quite!
Next: Miranda ("Viv") Richardson. The movie can't seem to make up its mind about her. A brilliant woman eclipsed by her husband's fame? A free spirit suffocated by Eliot's need for a stodgy English life? Victim of an undiagnosed hormonal imbalance? Of a patriarchal society where the Lunacy Act and the male trustees her father leaves her fortune to (Eliot and her brother, as it happens) conspire to lock her up? A high-strung eccentric (chocolate in the mail slot) or stark raving mad? The movie flirts with all these options without really digging into any one of them.
Eliot too appears alternately as a duped lover, loving caretaker, and cold-hearted ogre who locks his wife away when she threatens to hurt his career. The upshot is that you never know these two at all. Why they fall in love, why they keep insisting they're in love through a sterile marriage, what makes either of them brilliant, what each needed in the other--we're told without ever really being shown. Blame it on the narrator, Viv's brother, whose reminiscences formed the basis of the play this movie's based on. Off to the war and then to Africa, conservative and cheerily philistine about what makes England England, he's not the best person to get inside a literary couple like Tom & Viv. The upshot? A middle-of-the-road period piece that trots out a series of clichés without showing much interest in getting beyond the surface of this brilliant, tragic couple.
We Are the Hollow Filmmakers...
Watching TOM & VIV is an exercise in frustration. In fact, it reminded me of all that's suspect about film biographies. Too sketchy on the one hand, and taking too many liberties with the facts on the other. (Those may be interrelated problems, come to think of it, both stemming from the near impossibility of compressing a whole life into two hours.) Every once in a while, something like KINSEY comes along that tells its tale in an original and fairly comprehensive way. But this 1994 release is not of that order.
In fact the nagging sensation that I got from viewing TOM & VIV was that I was really taking the lazy man's way out. I didn't know much about T.S. Eliot's life before. And I didn't learn a heck of a lot from this movie either. I don't know about you, but when a fact-based movie leaves me feeling that way, I tend to feel cheated. You may not always know if there's a superior book or other source material out there (this movie is based on a play, which may or may not have actually been better), but a movie like this makes you feel like you need to do a whole lot more research before you can even talk about such key issues as: whether or not it's accurate; whether or not it's fair; whether or not it even begins to approach the truth of its subjects' lives.
Miranda Richardson and (in a surprisingly understated way) Willem Dafoe try their level best to bring depth to their underwritten parts. The film wants to be somewhat fair, and while many viewers (see some of the critiques below) will probably come away thinking that Eliot was a "monster," it is apparent that the film is actually trying for a somewhat more nuanced view. A bit of a cad, certainly a prig--and an artist who fled from emotion rather than embracing it. But did he cruelly institutionalize his mentally unstable wife and deliberately keep her there even after it became clear that she was suffering more from hormonal imbalance rather than insanity? Or was he simply acting out of the same ignorance as all her doctors and, for that matter, her family? Since he did not act alone in these matters, it hardly seems fair to single him out for vilification.
Or maybe it does. But we need more facts, s'il vous plait. And maybe a better narrative would help. Apparently, there was some difficulty getting the estate's permission to quote extensively from Eliot's actual poetry. The one or two examples of same are riveting and suggestive of what this movie could have been had it focused more on the artist's art--and if it had given us a glimpse or two more of the nature of the Eliots' actual collaboration. Vivienne is described as his muse and his best reader, but that's the problem. She's DESCRIBED. We don't see much of their supposed collaboration (well, there is a scene where they're reviewing proofs of THE WASTELAND) and wind up pretty much having to take the characters' word for it.
There were moments when I was reminded of another film about a genius who married badly and whose wife wound up in an asylum. Ken Russell's MUSIC LOVERS covered much of the same ground. And while many found Russell's film wildly uneven, it had panache and a kind of reckless energy that a more staid, solmemn piece like TOM & VIV could benefit from.
When all is said and done, the film leaves you wondering which is worse: the moral failings of artists or the artistic failings of moralists.
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