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Something went wrong with this adaptation of a long un-produced Tennessee Williams script. Could it be the casting? The limp and uninspired direction? The fact that the script was undercooked and needed more rewrites to really be something? It was everything. But there's still a small spark of what could have been buried underneath the southern heat and genteel society parties. It comes in the form of Ellen Burstyn as Miss Addie, a severely disabled woman thanks to a history of opium addiction and a series of strokes. I wanted to know more about her history. Our main heroine, Fisher Willow, seems so small compared to her. Addie has a spark, a verve and nerve that the greatest of Williams' heroines possess, even as they descend into madness, poverty, or both. Burstyn plays the role for everything that it is worth and adds the neurotic, eccentric, wonderfully alive despite the encroaching darkness essence that thrives in the best of Williams.
But Fisher Willow could have had something in her too, if they had found a better actress. Bryce Dallas Howard may have many strengths as an actress, but playing a brittle, neurotic, rebellious, high-strung, vainglorious, tough Southern belle isn't one of them. The original choice for the role, Lindsay Lohan before she descended into the drug-and-alcohol fueled madness that Blanche DuBois knows all about, would have been much better. While Lohan has yet to truly show a remarkable amount of life or talent as an actress, she has something brittle, unhinged and destructive about her. That would have made all the difference.
While never truly awful, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond is frequently just limp. Could a few more rounds of rewriting have saved this story? Maybe. Something would have needed to be done about the climatic Halloween party which comprises most of the film's running time. The characters never really mesh together. Think of the way that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof created a claustrophobic family life that had the air practically tasting of secrets. Or the way that The Glass Menagerie played so lucidly with guilt, memories, parent-driven neurosis, and a kind of sick co-dependence between mother and children. The way outsiders broke into those comfortably tense settings and ripped out the vault door for the secrets and lies to come tumbling out, that was what made them so dramatically and artistically solid. The genteel society in this film is nothing but a bunch of stock players. Characters only talk when it's necessary. There's no true weight or feeling to the group that has assembled so. They glare at Willow because they must, but never because we truly believe in the conflict. As a Williams fan, I am glad that I watched it. But by the end I just wanted to watch Streetcar, Suddenly, Last Summer, or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof even more.
