Early reviews: Tennessee Williams’ movie “The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond”
We noted the release of “The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond” here from the NY Times:
Though he was a famously successful adapter of his own work, Williams was not a natural screenwriter, and, remarkably, of the almost 50 movies made from Williams material, Ms. Markell’s film — starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Ellen Burstyn and Ann-Margret and opening on Wednesday — is the only one that didn’t begin life as something else. It’s also the first major Williams movie in decades — a reanimation of a film career that once rivaled his stage success.
Now the reviews are coming in:
Hollywood Reporter: “The story is a sketchy, dramatically muddled rumination on familiar Williams themes about the Old South and its brave, beautiful, rebellion women always on the brink of love, suicide or madness. Williams was infamous for rewriting plays and stories for year so the guess here is the “Teardrop” was at best a second draft.”
Los Angeles Times: “Never produced, then shelved these last 50 years (I suspect because it feels like an early draft), “Teardrop Diamond” comes to us with its characters not fully fleshed to their breaking or boiling point, the playwright’s specialty. Instead, the film is more like an old photo album that conjures up faded memories, with Markell fearful of dusting off the cobwebs in deference to the master.”
New York Times: “As in so many of Williams’s plays, Fisher and Addie are the poignant manifestations of the restless dreamers and poets with whom he passionately identified: wayward moths fluttering unsteadily toward a light glimpsed through the windows of the prisons in which they find themselves alone and misunderstood.”
Film Journal: “Tennessee-born Jodie Markell, making her feature debut with this film, says she felt a strong emotional connection to Fisher and to this portrait of Southern society of the ’20s, hidebound to tradition even as much of the post-war world has throwing caution to the wind. You sense this in the loving shots of decaying plantation buildings, the moon on the river and willow trees bending to the wind as her heroine searches for a love that will forever be denied her. All Markell really needed was for her writer to be alive to write another draft or two.”
Village Voice: “Consider: If Tennessee Williams’s script for Joseph Losey’s 1968 turkey Boom! (an adaptation of his play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore) saw the light of day, just how bad must a Williams screenplay unproduced for decades be?”
A consensus seems to be emerging about Williams’ original screenplay: That it does not represent a finished product, but instead comes off (primarily in terms of thin characterizations) as a first or, at best, second draft. Given Williams’ status as an American dramatist, the movie is worth screening if only to see his work, even if flawed. However it’s a good reminder to all of us about our own screenplays: Make sure we’ve done all we can do to create a polished story.