The Great Lillian Hall: Sublime character study

The Great Lillian Hall (2024) • View trailer

4.5 stars (out of five). Rated TV-14, for dramatic intensity

Available via: HBO MAX

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.9.24

Julianne Moore won a well-deserved Academy Award for her performance in 2014’s Still Alice, as a linguistics professor doing her best to cope with a slide into Alzheimer’s.

 

Jessica Lange deserves the same reward, for her richly nuanced work in this film.

 

Edith (Kathy Bataes, left) loses her patience — but not her compassion — when longtime
best friend Lillian (Jessica Lange) refuses to believe that anything is truly wrong with her.

The similarities are cruelly ironic. Just as Moore’s Alice Howland was horrified by her failing connection with the language career central to her very being, Lange’s Lillian Hall cannot conceive of a future without her ability to command a stage in front of an admiring, sell-out audience. It’s who she is...

...to the almost total exclusion of her adult daughter, to that poor woman’s dismay. But that’s getting ahead of things.

 

Scripter Elisabeth Seldes Annacone was inspired by her aunt, Tony Award-winning stage and film actress Marian Hall Seldes, whose busy career included every one of the 1,809 performances of Ira Levin’s play Deathtrap, which earned her mention in the Guinness Book of World Records. She worked tirelessly until 2011, at which point — sadly — she spiraled into dementia during the final three years of her life.

 

Annacone’s sensitive script is handled with assurance by director Michael Cristofer, best known for theater works that include his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Shadow Box. His approach here feels very much like a stage play, which focuses on the crucial few days when veteran stage actress Lillian Hall (Lange) — proud of the fact that she’s never missed a performance during her long and celebrated career — realizes that she no longer can conceal her worsening condition from the world.

 

Or from herself.

 

Annacone and Cristofer split their narrative into three parallel elements: rehearsals of Lillia ‘s next starring role, in a production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard; intimate glimpses of her personal life, whether alone at home or in the company of family and colleagues; and B&W “interview footage” of various individuals filmed for the electronic press kit that’ll accompany the play’s opening.

 

On stage, it becomes increasing clear that Lillian has trouble remembering her lines, to the dismay of play director David Flemming (Jesse Williams). He has long admired her, and has been making allowances ... and excuses to the other cast members. 

 

Producer Jane Stone (Cindy Hogan) is more pragmatic; she’s horrified by the possibility that the star who attracted this production’s financial backers, may prove incapable of making it to opening night.

Marlowe: Rich, retro gumshoe ambiance

Marlowe (2022) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity, violence, sexual content and drug use

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

Noir fans will love this one.

 

Director Neil Jordan, always up for a challenge, has faithfully embraced the hard-bitten realm of Raymond Chandler’s laconic, world weary private detective, Philip Marlowe.

 

Marlowe (Liam Neeson) is seasoned enough to know it's unwise to fall for a client, but
Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) is rather hard to resist...

William Monahan’s screenplay draws from 2014’s The Black-Eyed Blonde, a Marlowe continuation novel authorized by the Chandler estate, and written by celebrated Irish author John Banville under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, which he has adopted as a pen name for his crime novels. 

Banville’s book is set during the 1950s, as befits a case taking place after Chandler’s final novel, 1958’s Playback, wherein Marlowe acknowledges his advanced age. Jordan and Monahan’s key change bounces these events back to October 1939, the year Chandler’s first Marlowe novel — The Big Sleep — was published.

 

It could be argued that star Liam Neeson, now in his early 70s, would have been a better fit for the seasoned 1950s Marlowe … but the actor slides so smoothly into the character’s shrewdly observant, quietly sardonic PI manner, that it scarcely matters.

 

Production designer John Beard has done a remarkable job of re-creating the Southern California metropolis of Bay City, Chandler’s fictitious depiction of Santa Monica (particularly since exterior filming took place in Barcelona, Spain). As befits the smoky noir atmosphere, cinematographer Xavi Giménez makes excellent use of light, dark, shadows and reflections, particularly during the story’s many nighttime settings.

 

Events kick off when chiffon blond heiress Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) hires Marlowe to find her lover, Nico Peterson, who has been missing for a fortnight. Marlowe and his new client spar verbally, amid mildly flirtatious overtones; she likes it when he uses her last name as her first name. Neeson and Kruger handle this exchange smoothly, further enhancing the tone we expect from a Chandler novel.

 

Marlowe senses that Clare isn’t being entirely candid; additional information requires patience. She eventually acknowledges that her husband Richard (Patrick Muldoon) loves only “polo, alcohol, waitresses … and my money.” Even so, it would appear that Nico was more than a passing fancy.

 

With help from cop friend Joe Green (Ian Hart), Marlowe soon learns that Nico is dead, having been run over by a car while exiting the posh, gated and heavily guarded Corbata Club: playground of the rich and dissolute. Club manager Floyd Hanson (Danny Huston), when Marlowe finally wheedles an interview, is brusque and unconcerned; the accident took place on the street outside the club gates, and — therefore — isn’t his concern.