home | Psychology of Video Games | contact | about | RSS 
« Week 302: The Incident in the Laundry Room |Main| Book Review: Grand Theft Childhood »
Review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) November 12, 2009
Note: This is #45 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009.
Man, I'm really of multiple minds on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? On the one hand, it can basically be summarized as "Two crazy, spiteful people are horribly mean to each other for 131 minutes; local couple taken along for the ride." But on the other hand, the film makes a dark counter-point to the idealized American dream and the 1950s concept of the perfect American family living out a quiet and happy life. It's also interesting if shocking to see these characters at work on each other.
The story, such as it is, focuses on George (Richard Burton) and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor), an aging couple living in a small New England college town. It's evident pretty much immediately that they hate each other. George is an Associate Professor and Martha mostly goes on about how she's the daughter of the University President. The movie opens on the couple at 2:00 a.m. as the couple stumbles home from a party and Martha announces that she's invited a couple of fellow party-goers back to their house for a night cap. The young couple, Nick (George Segal) and Honey (Sandy Dennis) arrive and quickly get pulled into the vortex of spite and cruelty inherant to the older couple's relationship. What's more, the venom spreads between the four characters and by the end of the movie everyone hates everyone else and is doing their utmost to hurt each other. Badly.
And man, what performances. While Elizabeth Taylor is the butt of many jokes here in 2009, she gave an incredible performance in this role, only eclipsed by Richard Burton as her husband George. These two in particular REALLY sell their crazy hate for each other and draw you in; you can feel the spite so palpably that it's often uncomfortable and the movie actually takes effort on the viewer's part to watch. What's better (or worse, depending on your perspective) is that this isn't the kind of over the top farcical crazy where you can just write it off as "Oh, that's just a character in a movie exaggerated for effect." No, you get the feeling that this is how two wicked, cruel people who really, really hate each other and who despair for their life's lost potential would act if they didn't know or care that you and I were watching. It's horribly good.
It's also worth mentioning that this is the most vulgar movie I've come across yet in this experiment --indeed it's the only one to date. But true to the spirit of keeping it terribly real, the script is filled with pages of "God dammnits" and "son of a bitches" as well as all manner of crude innuendo. Apparently it was a bit of a controversy at the time, even if it seems relatively tame now.
So, this is a hard one. I'd recommend seeing the movie, but warn you that you're in for something that smacks of a stage play ported to the big screen (which it was). You've got to be in it for talking (and screaming) heads and to experience the characters and the drama, because that's the territory to which it sticks. But the performances are amazing.
Comments (0) |
Permalink | 
File under:
Movies
Tags: Movies, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
