Jessica Lange has been an exciting actress since her screen debut as a ditzy starlet who is cradled gently in a giant ape’s palm in King Kong 50 years ago, and she’s just as much fun to watch today in The Great Lillian Hall, which opens in theaters around Israel on Thursday.
Lange breathes life into a story about a Broadway diva who, months into rehearsals for a much-anticipated revival of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, discovers she is struggling with dementia.
Suddenly, she cannot remember her lines, and even simple blocking becomes a challenge for her. There is probably no other kind of acting as unforgiving of momentary lapses as this kind of stage performance.
The mistakes an ordinary 70-something-year-old might make with no consequences are amplified in the theater. If a Broadway actress isn’t at her best all the time, there is really no way she can continue.
While the reality of having to retire because of a dementia diagnosis would be daunting for anyone, for Lillian, it’s far more devastating because the theater has always been her life.
She was never there for her resentful daughter (Lily Rabe), and Lillian and her late husband had a tumultuous relationship, which we learn about as she hallucinates that he is back in her life again.
Most days, her only human contact off stage is with her loyal but bluntly honest assistant, Edith (Kathy Bates). Bates is also a distinctive, Oscar-winning actress who revels in this role.
The part she plays is patterned after the roles Thelma Ritter used to play in such classics as Rear Window and All About Eve, the wisecracking helper who can be taken for granted up to a point but who knows where all the bodies are buried. Seeing Bates and Lange sparring with each other is the greatest pleasure of this movie.
Bates, Lange elevate The Great Lillian Hall
The two of them – and especially Lange – elevate what could have been a TV movie-of-the-week about dementia into something much deeper and more moving.
Most of us have seen too many movies to count about self-absorbed workaholics who were horrible parents and are running out of time to make things right with their offspring.
But Lange takes a slightly clichéd role and makes one truly feel her horror over the encroaching dementia, which threatens the only aspect of her life that feels worth living to her: her career.
Her Lillian is unabashedly egocentric, so sure is she of her talent, and she manages to convince viewers that she is one of the most legendary stage actresses of all time.
The line readings from The Cherry Orchard that she does get right offer parallels to her mental decline. She’s also charming, sensuous, funny, and over-the-top in every way, and one can see how she got away with so much for so long in her personal life.
Pierce Brosnan lifts the mood at times as Lillian’s flirtatious, pot-smoking artist neighbor, who may or may not become her last lover.
Lange’s work here reminded me of a moment in a documentary about Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words, in which her eldest daughter, Pia Lindström, said that she did not resent her often-absent mother.
“I just missed her presence,” Lindström had said. “And because she was so delightfully open and amusing, I craved, my whole life, to have more of her.” Lange makes us see that Lillian was another such mother.
The movie stumbles in some of its depictions of backstage backstabbing, with Jesse Williams giving a credible performance as the in-demand young director who had no idea that the star he idolizes might be a flawed human being, and Cindy Hogan as a tough-as-nails producer.
These characters are used to the usual power games in the theater and are unsettled when it turns out that they cannot manipulate a star suffering from dementia.
They have a dilemma: they need Lillian’s star power to make this Chekhov revival a hit financially, and so they try to push their failing star.
This all makes dramatic sense, and the director, Michael Cristofer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the play The Shadow Box, knows this world backward and forwards.
At times, though, he lays it on a little thick. The point that theater folk can be self-involved is driven home a few times too many.
But the heart of the movie is how Lillian is forced to grapple with her illness. If you have ever seen someone you love fade away in the grip of dementia, the movie may give you new insight into what people go through as they lose sight of who they are.
Lange starring in small-screen roles recently
Two-time Oscar winner Lange, who won her statuettes for her roles as a soap-opera actress in Tootsie and an unhinged military wife in Blue Sky, has been seen mostly on the small screen in recent years.
She has won three Emmys for her performances in American Horror Story and the movie Grey Gardens, and she was also stellar as Joan Crawford in the series Feud.
She starred in a new film adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but it has not yet been released.
While The Great Lillian Hall is playing in movie theaters here, in most of the world, it was available to stream on HBO Max, rather than in theaters.
But Lange is an amazing actress who has lived large – her children were fathered by dancer/actor Mikhail Baryshnikov and the late playwright/actor Sam Shepard – and it is wonderful to see her on the big screen again.