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Sunday, January 24, 2010
THE LOSS OF A TEARDROP DIAMOND reviewed by Major League
The new movie THE LOSS OF A TEARDROP DIAMOND (screenplay by Tennessee Williams) is flawed, but Maj. League says: go to see it at the theatre. Williams' masterpieces are well known (CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF and A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, both Pulitzer winners) and familiarity with those classics will inform any attempt to understand the Teardrop movie. Perhaps even more illuminating is reference to Williams' life (the lobotomy of his schizophrenic sister, father's alcoholism, mother's near hysteria, and his own homosexuality). This screenplay was written in the mid-fifties, but not made into a movie until now, probably for a good reason: Williams tries to cover an enormous amount of ground. Themes or facets include the vapidity of high society anywhere and, more seriously, the ill consequences of class-based society; the distortions and disparities of economic life in the New South (Mississippi) in the 1920s; the destructive effects of alcoholism; drug experimentation; assisted suicide; the fall of families from power and grace; madness -- and, in the end, the insistence of love in the midst of all that chaos. Is that enough for one movie to cover? No, it is too much, which may account for the unevenness of plot and the sometimes flawed dialog. To begin, the moviegoer must suspend some disbelief when Williams' fulcrum premise is presented: that on a moonlit night two years earlier, the father of the distaff protagonist dynamited a major levee on his plantation for inexplicable reasons (insanity?), causing deaths and destruction downstream. The father seems to be gone (dead?) when the action begins, but his destructive act has socially disgraced the family in the nearby city, Memphis, where the daughter named Fisher Willow is, at the demand of her aunt, now going through the social season as an older than average, and inebriated, debutante. The young woman is heiress-to-be of two family fortunes, and she recently returned from Europe, where she spent time in the arms of an Italian count and in a Zurich mental clinic. To participate in Memphis social events as a debutante, Fisher requires a male escort, so she more or less requisitions the son of the manager of the plantation's commissary (recall that the plantation slavery of the Old South was replaced with a sharecropping regime under which the the landowner controlled all aspects of the tenant's life, including an obligation to buy supplies from the plantation store so as to further augment the growth of the owner's fortune). The young man, Jimmy Dobbyn V, is the penniless grandson of a former governor; his family has suffered a serious downturn with his mother committed to a mental institution and his father unreliable as an alcoholic. Jimmy is intelligent and handsome, and Fisher outfits him in proper evening clothes so that he can drive her yellow Pierce Arrow convertible and accompany her to debutante parties. Jimmy is heterosexual -- in one scene in a men's room at a fancy hotel, he punches out a gay man who leered at him (some say Williams had trouble coming to grips with his own homosexuality) -- and Fisher is attractive and smart, but she is also rich, and Jimmy feels as if she is his employer. The key scenes occur during a Halloween party at another plantation house after one of Fisher's very valuable (and borrowed) teardrop diamond earrings is lost, with resulting recriminations, suspicions, and tensions. In the course of this night, the gothic nature of the life of the Southern elite is clearly, if chaotically, disclosed: binge drinking of moonshine by the young men; a game of post office that results in a quick coupling of Jimmy with a young woman whom he seems to have known previously; an experiment with laudanum by Fisher; and Fisher's assistance in the suicide of a crippled aunt of the hostess of the party in an upstairs bedroom. In the final frames, at dawn out on a Mississippi levee, Fisher's love for Jimmy is revealed, and apparently reciprocated by Jimmy. As my fellow moviegoer remarked, "There is a lot going on in that movie!" The story line persists although the dialog that does not always quite hang together. Maj. League spent time in graduate school focusing on the history of the New South, and in that connection he has long appreciated the works of that product of the New South, Tennessee Williams, who died in 1983 at age 71 (in 1973, I saw him speak publicly -- he read some of his work while reclining on the rostrum, wearing denim pants and shirt with a red bandana around the neck). All in all, Maj. League says: this movie is worth seeing, despite the flaws, particularly if you have any acquaintance with life in the South in the early twentieth century. Labels: THE_LOSS OF_A_TEARDROP_DIAMOND 
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