Pitch Perfect is in here as a palette cleanser between two fairly grim movies—some of the humor feels mean now in a way that it didn’t on first viewing & I was sorry to realize it. The announcers have some really sharp dialogue, though, and I was impressed once again that this movie was confident enough in its subject matter to dedicate a lot of time to the performances. It’s delightful.
Then Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which I hadn’t seen before. I found it compelling, and a worthwhile watch, even if I can’t say I enjoyed it. It was released in 1966 & it was the first movie Mike Nichols ever directed. A year later, he made The Graduate—which, having seen them both almost back to back, absolutely boggles the mind. They feel like they’re from different eras. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a black and white movie with Old Hollywood stars. The Graduate is in color, and it made careers instead of capping off grand ones.
It’s about an established married couple, George and Martha, who invite a younger couple, Nick and Honey, over for a nightcap. By the time the younger couple arrive, George and Martha have been fighting and the arrival of guests doesn’t stop them. Instead of putting on their best behavior, they draw Nick and Honey into their dramas. Everyone drinks more than they should, things devolve, and the cycle repeats.
The whole thing escalates from an awkward, inappropriate mess into a kind of uncontrollable madness. It feels a little like a dance with the maenads—not fun maenads, dangerous ones who’d as soon tear you apart as dance with you—or a stop on Odysseus’s long journey home, a dangerous adventure spiced with a moral. George and Martha (that’s Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, while they were a couple) are in an incredibly toxic relationship but it’s less a story with a villain and a victim than one about two people who bring out the worst in one another, who deliberately provoke one another to extremes of cruelty. It’s a portrait of a bad marriage, and only makes sense in world where divorce is unthinkable.
The acting is very good—Burton and Taylor both spend this very long movie dialed up to 11, emoting intensely and harshly at one another—but the writing strikes me as uneven, and mostly where Martha is concerned. George is a character we get to know from every side: his youth, his career, his marriage, his passions. He’s complex, if not terribly sympathetic. Martha is a woman whose entire identity is constituted in relationship to the men in her life. She’s the President’s daughter, the academic’s wife, the mother of… a beanbag? Hard to tell. All her hopes, all her regrets, all her griefs derive from their triumphs or failures. To the extent that she has a life of her own, a hobby maybe, it appears to be seducing other men.
As an emotional journey, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is still extraordinary. As a story about a couple or a marriage, it feels like a relic.