Two films focusing on crumbling, spiraling marriages? Full of seething anger and pent-up hates and resentments, with love utterly and wholly defeated? This may be the double-billing from hell for some, but it makes for great cinema. “Blue Valentine” is a recent art-house hit, and it may gain cult status as wider and wiser audiences seek it out. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” – a needed follow-up, especially in light on Elizabeth Taylors’ death -- is hands-down one of the all-time, you-must-watch-this classics. Shockingly, the older film still is the darker of two, by light years.
“Blue” opens on a young married couple (Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams) and their daughter, and stays with them for a long weekend. A bad, soul-crushing weekend. The family dog escaped from the backyard pen and is missing. The high-speed rural highway below the house is not a good omen, and the dog is indeed found dead. This moment is the final crack in a crumbling marriage. But all is not grim.
We flashback to when Dean and Cindy first meet. He’s a high-school dropout who can barely get through a job interview for a moving company. She is fresh off a bad breakup, hails from an emotionally violent home, and yearns to be a doctor. They click, wonderfully and explicitly, but can it last? They rush toward marriage because Cindy is pregnant, and Dean wants to be a father and a husband, even if the child is not his. The question must be asked: Are they right for each other? Each so humanly, woefully flawed?
Writer/director Derek Cianfrance pulls no punches as the twin plots surges toward utter happiness (past) and absolute destruction (present). The last scene is perfect, as is much of the film (a run-in with the ex-beau doesn’t seem to work in retrospect, a shouted comment from a friend of Cindy’s is so out-there odd, it stops a big scene near dead). Williams and Gosling are funny, euphoric, devastating, sexy, sad, dire, and everything you could ever want or fear. The little girl playing the daughter is heartbreaking sweet.
A-
If “Blue Valentine” is a knife to the gut, then “Virginia Woolf” is an atom bomb. Real-life married couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor play George and Martha, he an associate professor, she the daughter of the university president. The setting: A New England college, probably one of those small, private snob schools. After a drunken faculty party, George and Martha stumble home, and talk and flirt to no avail, and bicker a bit. And bicker some more. Just as a young professor and his wife come to the house – Martha unwisely invited them over at 2 a.m. – the bickering turns ugly. Flesh ripped from bone ugly.
For the rest of this one night, George and Martha filet each other, with the young couple (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) held hostage, scared to stay, and equally hesitant to leave. Two decades of bitterness, past hurts, accusations and anger are coming to a full, raging boil. The crux: George’s lack of ambition against Martha’s beloved “daddy,” the couple’s absent son, and the endless amounts of alcohol readily available. I can’t recall any other film where so much alcohol is poured and consumed. It is their fuel.
Directed by Mike Nichols, in his debut, this Edward Albee play just kills on screen. Just when you think there can be no more hate or vile petty anger, the film sinks lower. And the acting soars. “Woolf” won an armful of Oscars, and should have taken more. Taylor – in heavy makeup, packing on weight and slurring her voice – plays 20 years her senior, and Burton is as scary as Lector and sad as Job in his role.
Their infamous double marriage surely adds blood to the proceedings as George and Martha bait and trap each other with words of war, how can it not? (Google Burton’s acidic comment on Taylor’s win and his snub of an Oscar. Holy shit!) Segal and Dennis also burn bright as a couple with their own dirty laundry.
“Woolf” is a must-watch, for its acting, the cinematography, the mere gamesmanship of trying to out-think George and Martha as they slash into each other, snarling like animals, and for the final confrontation. A ripe 44 years old, “Woolf” still packs some of the most deeply biting dialogue ever filmed.
A+
