The Great Lillian Hall Dir: Michael Cristofer (13th Floor Film Review)
In The Great Lillian Hall, a legend of cinema plays a legend of theatre playing a Russian aristocrat in Michael Cristofer’s sensitively handled study of art imitating life.
Starring Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Lily Rabe, Jesse Williams, and Pierce Brosnan.
“Has everything been taken away, has everything gone?” asks Jessica Lange’s Broadway legend Lillian Hall as Madame Ranevskaya in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
The line serves as a poignant centrepiece for the themes of loss and abandonment that are woven into the fabric of Elisabeth Seldes Annacone’s screenplay for The Great Lillian Hall.
Loosely inspired by the story of Annacone’s aunt, American stage actress Marian Seldes, the film is a beautifully executed depiction of a woman learning to accept loss.
The loss of her beloved husband and the loss of her memory and mental agility, as rapid onset Dementia begins to lead her on its unrelenting march towards the inevitable.
Lillian Hall is a renowned and highly revered theatre actress who, in midst of rehearsals for a Broadway revival of The Cherry Orchard, is diagnosed with Dementia.
A diagnosis that would be devastating for anyone but for a celebrated actress, carrying the weight of a major production on her shoulders it is not only devastating, but also completely unacceptable. Therefore she refuses to accept it.
Adopting the “if I fail to acknowledge the elephant it will leave the room” strategy, Lillian forges ahead with her theatrical commitment to take to the stage as Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard.
Which, in case you didn’t know, is Chekov’s seminal play about memories as a source of personal identity and the inevitable decline of a way of life.
And that would be a metaphor folks, which would usually make me roll my eyes, but in this case, all involved manage to pull it off with grace and emotional intelligence .
This is a film to be quietly savoured. The performances are consistently strong, in particular those of Kathy Bates as Lillian’s always supportive but increasingly at her wits end, agent and Lily Rabe as the daughter who has grown up in her mother’s shadow and is trying (sometimes too hard) to forge a deeper connection with her famous parent.
Lange’s performance is the strongly beating heart around which The Great Lillian Hall revolves, and is also the reason that this empathetically told tale of a legendary actress coming to terms with a new version of herself, could just as easily have been named “The Great Jessica Lange”.
Jo Barry
The Great Lillian Hall is in cinemas now.
