Plot intro
A married couple in their late 40s/early 50s, George (Richard Burton) and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) arrive home at 2am from a party hosted by Martha’s father. They have invited a young couple, Nick (George Segal) and Honey (Sandy Dennis), who they met at the party, to join them in some after-party drinks. Unfortunately, George and Martha’s marriage is far from happy and they have been drinking heavily, leading to a long night or alcohol-fuelled abuse, awkwardness and cold hard truth-telling…
We saw the recent stage version of this starring Imelda Staunton, Conleth Hill, Luke Treadaway and Imogen Poots, so I went into WAOVW? with no delusions about the fact that it is a gruelling, heartbreaking, seemingly endless tale of two couples who really should not be married and a cautionary tale for anyone who wants the Stepford-Wives, white-picket-fence lifestyle. It is intrinsically tied to the 1960s’ reassessment of what young people should do with their lives, the importance of marriage, and the burden of tradition.
George and Martha are, in my opinion, the epitome of dysfunction, who might as well get marriage advice from Basil and Sybil Fawlty. As the story progresses, we are exposed to the darkest depths of their psyche and their past. They evidently married young (as many people would have done in the ‘40s), with George getting a job working under Martha’s unseen but despotic and having all the hopes and dreams consistent with patriarchal, white, Christian marriage (job, wealth, house, children, grandchildren etc). But things have gone awry. George’s career is floundering and he appears indifferent to virtually everything. Martha is suffocating in a very mediocre lifestyle and wants fun and excitement. They are both absolute repugnant to each other. And they keep mentioning a son who is conspicuously absent…
Nick and Honey, meanwhile, are the young couple George and Martha once were. Aspirational, gorgeous, affable. But the cracks are already appearing. They evidently have love for each other, but Nick is under pressure to establish himself and Honey makes a few fractious comments about their life and Nick’s career - then proceeds to get horribly drunk and have a breakdown. What quickly becomes apparent is that Nick and Honey are seeing their future in George and Martha, while the latter are seeing their past in the former, and neither couple like it. For the rest of the night, they drunkenly, relentlessly, and unashamedly tear into each other like wild animals.
Elizabeth Taylor’s performance is considered one of the most seminal in cinema, certainly one of the most deserving winners of the Best Actress Oscar, and a far cry from her usual glamorous fare. She gained 30 pounds (just over 2 stone or about 13 kg) in order to play a character nearly 20 years older than she actually was (she was only 33). The energy she puts into a lonely, unfulfilled housewife with a patronising, apathetic husband is rarely matched. When she mocks him, it’s vicious; when she rants at him, it’s heart-breaking; and when all is revealed at the end and she finally faces up to the reality of her life, it’s exceptionally powerful. Both she and her husband, Burton, put a lot of work into minimal working hours. They ensured that they were contracted to work only 10am to 6pm but also spent hours in hair and make-up, plus had long boozy lunches, so filming could sometimes only last a couple of hours of the day.
It helps that she is accompanied by three other excellent performances, all of which were also nominated, with Sandy Dennis’ hilariously overstated performance as a young woman drinking and revealing a little too much winning Best Supporting Actress. It’s also brilliantly scripted by playwright Edward Albee and adapted by Ernest Lehman, who doesn’t do much to the original play other than chop it down a bit. The characters speak in ways that are both profound but also nonsensical, reflecting how they have so much to express (and very much need therapy in all its forms) but their inability to do so due to the insane amounts of alcohol they miraculously manage to consume throughout the night without needing their stomachs pumped.
This film requires a deep breath before watching. If you’ve been in an environment with domestic abuse, alcohol abuse, or generally a very confrontational household, then you may wish to approach with some caution because it doesn’t hold back. The virility and viciousness with which the four characters launch into each other gets going from the first minute and never really stops. There are times when I wondered why any one of them are still there at all, although I think they’re meant to be so drunk that they can’t make any decent decisions. But it’s a brilliant piece of work, a dissection of conventional marriage, a satirical attack on a patriarchal society obsessed with Christian coupling and nuclear families, and still quite timely.
Elizabeth Taylor IS the Moment. But Sandy Dennis gets a lot of laughs from her drunken staggering and screaming, and manages to insert some levity into a very intense two hours.
When the two women are off-screen, the film loses its pace a little bit. In particular, there’s a scene between George and Nick on the lawn outside the house that goes on longer than it needs to and could have been chopped down very easily.
Spoilers abound in my review…
Buckle your seatbelts, you’re in for a bumpy night. That’s a Bette Davis quote, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opens with another Davis quote (‘What a dump!’) and quickly spirals through two hours of rage, disappointment, spite and - for the hopeful among us - a sign of hope at the end.
I may be biased but Albee’s play is one of the absolute greatest 20th century theatrical pieces. Even now, 61 years later, the story of Martha and George - a bitterly disappointed, angry couple who have created game-playing as a way to stay involved in the world - strikes home. Cast against the seemingly-perfect Nick and Honey (who as Paul says, quickly crumble to reveal their own set of overpowering ambition (Nick) and stubborn resistance to become the archetypal wife and mother (Honey)), Martha and George seem constantly to be entirely at war with each other, tied together and loathing each other.
But Albee doesn’t just present that - in fact I think that wouldn’t be half as powerful as what we get. There are touches throughout where Martha shows a willingness to soften, to want to physically be close to George (although he always rejects this) and the devastating ending actually suggests that perhaps the game-playing could end and they could find a new way of existing together.
Children throughout are an important part of it. Nick and Honey seem perfect but give them a few drinks (remember this is an afterparty which only gets going at 1am) and Nick is perfectly prepared to try and bed Martha for his career (she’s the college dean’s daughter) while Honey (perhaps the most drunk of them all) reveals the pregnancy she used to get Nick to marry her didn’t miscarry but was aborted - and Nick doesn’t know.
Meanwhile George and Martha’s son, hinted at throughout, details dropped like petals, becomes the crux of the play. He doesn’t exist. He’s a game they’ve played in private and Martha has - for the first time - mentioned him to Honey and made him real. It crescendoes until the savage, and deeply upsetting moment, where George kills him. You get the feeling that George has done this to try and end the games for good - even in the closing moments, Martha says ‘Maybe we could…’ and there’s a sense that she’s trying to revive a game - he didn’t die, there was a lost twin, something else that might save it. George simply says ‘no’, and Martha admits her frailty and loss and fear to him as the play closes.
It’s a bloody masterpiece.
I haven’t even mentioned the acting, but it is exceptional from all four corners. Richard Burton nails the ever-watching, secretly-desperate George who is exhausted from going toe-to-toe with Martha. It’s a difficult role but he makes it notable and affecting. George Segal finds savagery in Nick - this young handsome teacher who actually is quite nasty and has been forced into a loveless marriage already. Sandy Dennis (the other Oscar winner for this film) perhaps shines a little brighter, because Honey isn’t an easy role. She’s child-like but also determined, pathetic but also somehow the least scarred. She spends a lot of the second half off-screen, vomiting in the bathroom, and yet her presence is felt throughout.
And then there’s Taylor. We last saw her in BUtterfield 88 which frankly was a piece of trash compared to this. This is her Marion Cottillard in La Vie En Rose moment, where she gets to truly transform. It’s as if a cigar-wielding producer sat down and went ‘alright Ms Taylor, show us what you can do’. And boy does she.
She’s unrecognisable, deliberately changing her appearance for it and ageing about fifteen years in the process. She never lets go of Martha’s tiny streak of desire for George, using it to propel all the action, the screaming-matches make sense when you see how badly she wants him to want her. At the drunken height of the film (about 4am in the morning), she whispers to Nick how much George understands her and how he is the only one who can play her games as fast as she can change them (shot beautifully through a gauze screen door I might add). This woman knows how vile she can be, feels forced into it, still loves her husband despite baiting and attacking him and uses games in order to navigate the world that clearly terrifies her. If she were alive now, I think she’d be diagnosed with extreme anxiety.
It’s a masterful, layered performance - the like of which we don’t get every year. Taylor understands and inhabits this woman entirely, meaning while we may shy away from her, we never entirely dislike her. And as she sits, crushed by her fictional son’s death, the dawn breaks and we do hope that she and George can find a happier, more real way to be together.
Oh, and a word for director Mike Nichols. This was his first film, and the man knows what he’s doing. Sublime work - including the opening credits as Martha and George stumble home from the party through an ominous set of suburban houses.
Taylor leaves me in awe the whole film, but particularly the last third where Martha, in her drunkest state, opens up the shell of her inner-most feelings.
None. Nada.
Mark
10/10
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