By Sandra Hall
THE GREAT LILLIAN HALL ★★★★
(M) 108 minutes
Maybe it’s all the time she spent starring in American Horror Story, but Jessica Lange has become more febrile and actressy as she’s grown older, making her perfect for the role of Lillian Hall.
Jessica Lange in a scene from The Great Lillian Hall.Credit: Tina Rowden
Directed by a Broadway veteran, the playwright Michael Cristofer, The Great Lillian Hall is a tribute to the New York stage and one of its most revered performers, Marian Seldes, famous both for her talent and the fact that she rarely missed a performance, no matter the length of a play’s season.
The script is by her niece, Elisabeth Seldes Annacone, and the action takes place during rehearsals of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard just as Lillian, who shares Seldes’ work ethic, is starting to lose her grip. The first sign comes when she causes one of her co-stars to trip over the furniture and her troubles accelerate rapidly when the lines begin slipping from her memory.
Lange frequently overacts but that is the nature of the part. In her head, Lillian is never offstage. The doorman in the lobby of her apartment building on Central Park South is treated to a line from Chekhov as she leaves for the theatre, and a passing fan on the street gets the same treatment.
The only people who can get past the pose are her neighbour, Ty Maynard (Pierce Brosnan), an artist who shares her late-night confidences when they chat to one another from their adjoining balconies, and Edith (Kathy Bates), her salty-tongued housekeeper and assistant. Edith occasionally succeeds in putting her in touch with life’s realities but Lillian’s daughter, Margaret (Lily Rabe) lacks that gift.
Kathy Bates plays a salty-tongued housekeeper and assistant.
In an early scene, Margaret arrives for a scheduled breakfast with her mother only to find that Lillian has forgotten and is about to hurry off to rehearsal, and we gather from her response that this is the kind of disappointment she’s been dealing with for most of her life.
Films focusing on famous people during their darkest hours seem to be in vogue. We’ve recently seen Angelina Jolie in Maria, which takes Maria Callas through the last unhappy weeks of her life. Now we’re with Lillian as she receives her dementia diagnosis. The difference is that she’s refusing to give up. She will act in The Cherry Orchard even if she has to die in the attempt. And in this context, dying doesn’t mean merciful oblivion. It means total humiliation.
She is too driven to be likeable – except in her scenes with Edith. Their years of companionship have lent their conversations a healthy infusion of straight-talking and gallows humour. But her determination is admirable, as is her belated decision to be honest with herself. Faced with her career’s end, she’s at last looking back to see what she’s missed in allowing herself to be swallowed up by it.
The only person who understood her was her husband, whose ghost (Michael Rose) has taken to showing up when she least expects it. With a nod to Seldes’ husband – the late celebrated writer and director, Garson Kanin – his name is Carson and we learn that the theatre was their shared obsession, leaving little room for Margaret or anyone else.
And as Edith and Ty conspire to help her avoid the horrors of failure, their optimism becomes seductive. Chekhov’s contribution helps, too. When depicting the poignancy of saying farewell to something that has been a lifelong passion, he was a master.
The Great Lillian Hall is in cinemas from today.
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