The Great Lillian Hall
The Great Lillian Hall
Jessica Lange in “The Great Lillian Hall” plays veteran theater actres – Broadway stage diva who similarly to idolized females performers with roles of Blanche DuBois reincarnates the image because it was the roles and – believe it or not – themselves she really was. (They’re deluded in their own philosophy.) But just because Lillian Hall is extravagant in her performances does not mean that she is still concealing things.
Lange, at 75, has always been beautiful and over the years has naturally become more expressive with everything that she does. In ‘The Great Lillian Hall’, it’s a canvas teeming with sentiments and emotions that we don’t have to guess a great deal for. Even when Lillian is being a fraud (even when she’s playing a double game with herself), wow what a feeling!
In one poignant moment, Julie sits on a porch with her adult daughter Margaret (Lily Rabe), with whom she never had a relationship, ever since she was nine doing a show after every show; she had also gone to bed late and did not see her daughter very often — at nights. But Lillian used to return on time to put young Margaret to sleep and now, she sits on the porch and sings “Hush little darling don’t you cry…” in a soft voice.
Sometime has passed, and her voice has aged and what we see and hear in Jessica Lange, whose feelings are described as very faint but what she feels is so much more than that, is a myriad of consciousness: a bittersweet yearning for the past; the absence of Lillian’s maternal figure, which that has brought forth regret; and a new painful feeling wondering why and how much time has passed, realizing this very moment may be the last one. What nobody else knows is that she already has the diagnosis of dementia.
The situation is that in recent years a fair number of movie dramas dealing with dementia have appeared and for me some of them are very moving but also dramatically rather annoying. Lillian Hall 4: As the main character moves further into the background it is somehow possible for him or her to move into the background from the public as well.
This problem is solved by the film ‘The Great Lillian Hall’ in a straightforward manner. The action of the film occurs during the initial manifestation of Lillian’s symptomatology. The movie isn’t some sort of gothic melodrama about a woman struggling with her identity amidst the highs and lows of a Crekhov play about a family in decay. It is about peace: how someone grappling with this terrible diagnosis comes to terms with the future by strength and memories of the past.
Some drama does arise in the rehearsal when the actress is possessed by her symptoms. She botches her lines, messes up her stages, forgets the place where she is, and even falls flat on her face at one scene. What constitutes the most dramatic and interesting part of her illness, however, is in the wings: There is Lillian’s imaginary husband – the late Michael Rose a theatre director, but in her visions he looks more like a sophisticated European drug dealer than any artist.
The man working on the play is called David and there is no play to be directed without his name on it. He is in the middle of making a transition from “The Cherry Orchard” into Lillian’s arms but her dreams seem otherwise. The faith of Lillian has been lost but the strength does not seem to. Her producer however is professional. As she always does in the past, she is now asserting that the understudy will be substituted for her.
Elisabeth Seldes Annacone’s screenplay and Michael Cristofer’s direction render the film a contraption that (mostly) works. It’s a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, such as having Lillian’s neighbor, with whom she flirts over their adjacent Central Park South balconies, being a cheeseball Romeo typecast and played with a touch of weary affection by Pierce Brosnan, or having Lillian’s daughter deliver a line such as, “You didn’t truly wish to be my mother, you only made believe you did!” or the black and white faux-docu-interview centric outtakes that resemble Bob Fosse Gone Cable Lite.
The sense of suspense relating to whether Lillian will survive the rehearsal period and the opening night show – she is the play’s most marketable star – is what helps you get through even though it is firmly anchored around a fake note. Does someone who’s as troubled as Lillian is really able to do this show every day for an entire week, eternal months?
And yet Lange’s performance is so committed that she does genuinely bring enough worldliness into this sort of therapy-corn approach to The Show Must Go On that you may roll with it and almost believe it.
Lillian depends on her trusted assistant Edith (Kathy Bates) for almost everything, and these two actresses have an incredibly brutal and endearing rapport that is listenable for hours on end. There are a few scenes that bear witness to the pain of dementia (and Lange, at these instances, is convincing), however, “The Great Lillian Hall” is more or less a movie that takes the perspective of an actor and shows how one’s life has its challenges but in acting, it can all be made into a beautiful sweet equally exquisite illusion.
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- Genre: Drama
- Country: United States
- Director: Michael Cristofer
- Cast: Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Lily Rabe
