July is New Movies Month 📽️🎬
What’s going on with contemporary cinema? This month, I’ll be looking strictly at new releases. Will we learn anything? Who knows!
One thing about me is that if Jessica Lange is in something, I’m watching it. I came late to the Ryan Murphy-verse, and I remain its reluctant prisoner, but she is the primary reason I started watching his shit in the first place. When people like me talk about how impossible it was to see anything like us reflected onscreen in growing up, we’re not just talking about direct trans representation. In the 90s, there were so many amazing actresses enjoying career heydays. We had Whoopi Goldberg coming out with a solid string of hits, we had Kathy Bates, taking on the monstrous roles that others disdained and embodying them with a genuine, creepy brilliance. We had Sharon Stone, the sly, bisexual minx of one of the most confoundingly original films of the decade. It felt, for a minute, like people were interested in making movies about women who were more than wives or sex symbols or mothers, the old Sondheim trio1.
And then what happened? As usual I don’t know the answer. But I know that when I started to watch Jessica Lange’s performances in movies like Frances and The Postman Rings Twice remake and even that deeply weird Cousin Bette adaptation, I felt like there was something deeply wrong about the fact that she wasn’t being celebrated on the same level as legacy actresses like Susan Sarandon or Meryl Streep. But she’d found a way to keep on acting in an industry that famously throws women out after turning 40. She entered the Murphy-verse, along with other incredible, eccentric actors like Kathy Bates and Denis O’Hare and Lily Rabe. Because like it or not, that universe is a place where an actor’s freak flag can fly incredibly high. Call it camp, call it trash, whatever it is, it gave us more Jessica Lange performances than we would have had otherwise, and that’s the reason for my misguided loyalty. I’ll absorb his violent, candy-coated camp hellscapes if it means a chance to watch a collection of great actors do absurd line readings over Lady Gaga’s corpse, whatever that says about me.
Which brings me to The Great Lillian Hall—a non-Murphy production that holds little of the same promise, but many of the same actors, including Lange, Bates, and Rabe. That was why I was drawn to it—that and the promise of a film that would look at aging in a way that wasn’t corny or obnoxious or trite.
I often talk with my mother about the lack of media that centers women over 50. Sure, there’s the Book Club franchise and every so often Nancy Meyers decides to throw together a romcom about an aging lothario who can’t help but fall for Diane Keaton. But that’s not, from my understanding, what older women want. When my mom, a devotee of the Sex and the City extended universe, saw the first season of And Just Like That, she was disappointed by its inability to contend with the realities of aging. She was upset that Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte2 didn’t care to talk about the fact that they were, you know, getting up there in a city that considers women invisible after 36. Instead, it was business as usual: bags, shoes, pre-war classic sixes, hunky older boyfriends. Aging was not part of the equation, except for the men. Big dies suddenly in the first episode, and Steve, Miranda’s husband, is summarily dismissed as a romantic partner because of his hearing disability. The message is the same as always: aging can be fabulous, as long as you aren’t disabled yet.
The “yet” is the most important part. Disability is the state we will all come to sooner or later. So why is Hollywood so reluctant to actually talk about it?
Lillian Hall isn’t a perfect attempt to redress this—it hits largely the same plot points as the 2006 Alzheimer’s drama Away From Her—but it tries to. Sort of.
Lillian Hall is a great lady of the New York stage preparing to star in a new Broadway production of The Cherry Orchard. She lives in a beautiful apartment on Central Park South within walking distance of the theater. Her husband—a director who collaborated with her for many of her early performances—died some years ago, and her daughter lives in New Jersey with her family. It’s not that Lillian is cold or uninterested in family life—it’s that her life is still in the theater. But after she starts forgetting lines, a trip to the doctor reveals that she’s been suffering from late-stage Lewy body dementia.
This affliction—different from Alzheimer’s but with a similar memory loss impact—is perhaps most famous for being the thing that brought Robin Williams down in his final years. When Lillian learns of her diagnosis, she’s in denial. She feels like she can do the same things she’s always done—walk to the theater, say her lines, hit her marks. But the thing is, she can’t. Her body won’t let her. And a younger, flashier understudy waits in the wings to take her place the minute she’s deemed an insurance threat. It’s an aspect of aging that isn’t often looked at too closely, and I wish Lillian Hall was content to look a little closer.
It doesn’t do that—instead it trades on familiar visual cliches to try and put us inside Lillian’s head. She confuses the world of the Chekhov play for the real world, and ends up fainting onstage. Previews are coming up, and she’s just barely holding it together. Her late husband appears to hear at times, wearing a fedora and looking like he’s about to burst into a Sinatra medley. When we meet her improbably hot older neighbor—a surprisingly sexy Pierce Brosnan—we’re prepared to see that as a hallucination, too. But it’s not: his character seems to exist to run lines with her and be casually charming. So, too, does director Jesse Williams, doing his best to make something of a seriously underwritten role. When his producer—a bitchy lesbian trying to fire Lillian and get her ex the part instead—floats the idea of replacing Lillian, he says “the whole point is to mix downtown grit with old world theater royalty.” But what grit is he talking about? It’s a production of The Cherry Orchard that looks exactly like a production of The Cherry Orchard. The only avant-garde thing about it is Lillian’s forgetfulness, which weirdly adds to the role anyway.
The movie is a mess, is the thing, and a corny one, a kind of Birdman3 for ladies that doesn’t want to risk a too-unhappy ending. Lillian, in the end, pulls it off. The performance is great, and she even finds a way to apologize to her daughter for being a less than perfect mother, an apology every story about a driven mother in the arts must include. The movie puts itself in a difficult position from the start: are we going to tell the truth of this disease, or give this woman a happy ending?
It would be convenient to not have to make that decision, to have it both ways. But disability doesn’t work like that. If you’re going to tell the story of a person with a disability like Lewy body dementia, you can’t pull punches. You can’t make it glamorous. You have to tell the truth.
As with most areas of visibility, we’re not there yet. But I have hope that we’ll get there.
Next week: a gay movie I hated.
First you’re another sloe-eyed vamp/ then someone’s mother/then you’re camp
With a conspicuously absent Samantha
Birdwoman?
Always loved Jessica Lange! Sounds like this movie tries to avoid the hard choices but still sounds interesting.