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.

The Tender Bar: Wisdom served wry

The Tender Bar (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for considerable profanity and some sexual candor

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.21.22

The best coming-of-age stories possess a carefully calculated blend of warmth and gentle humor, along with the beating heart of such sagas: the relationship between mentor and mentee.

 

J.R. (Daniel Ranieri, left) soon realizes that school books aren't the sole source of
education. Some of life's best lessons come in a bowling alley, particularly when the
wisdom is dispensed by the boy's doting Uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck).

Director George Clooney’s precise touch with The Tender Bar absolutely honors the tone of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist J.R. Moehringer’s best-selling memoir, with its rich cast of quirky characters. At times, this feels like a modern, true-life Charles Dickens story: not a surprise, since books — and particularly Dickens — play an important role.

I only wish William Monahan’s screenplay had done a better job with Moehringer’s book. Condensing a 384-page tome into a 106-minute film obviously requires compromise, but — due to an ill-advised narrative decision — viewers likely will be dissatisfied with the result.

 

The story begins in 1972, as 9-year-old J.R. (Daniel Ranieri) spends hours each day scanning radio channels for “The Voice,” as he calls the deadbeat DJ father who deserted him and his mother Dorothy (Lily Rabe) years earlier. Despite her best efforts, she can’t make ends meet; reluctantly, she packs J.R. and their meager possessions into a car and drives to Manhasset, Long Island, returning to the now-dilapidated house where she grew up.

 

The homecoming isn’t entirely welcoming. Her curmudgeonly and unapologetically blunt father (Christopher Lloyd) views this as a sign of failure; we get a sense that he never forgave Dorothy the mistake of having taken up with her ex-husband. Her mother (Sondra James) is more cordial; her brother Charlie (Ben Affleck), still living with his parents — also to his father’s disgust — is pragmatic and sympathetic.

 

To J.R. — who goes by those initials because he’s actually a junior, which he refuses to acknowledge — Charlie is Uncle Charlie: an attentive, doting purveyor of wisdom and sage advice. J.R. does not want for love; Dorothy is fiercely protective, and a great believer in his potential — she repeatedly insists that he’ll one day go to Yale — but she also battles chronic depression.

 

Laid-back Uncle Charlie takes the edge off. While his approach to “parenting” probably wouldn’t win the approval of Social Services, he’s just what J.R. needs.

 

Affleck’s performance is sublime. Charlie is a self-educated truth-seeker with a closet full of classic books — this fascinates J.R. — and he works as a bartender at a local pub called Dickens, where additional stacks of books vie for space with the colorful liquor bottles. Affleck’s bearing is charismatic; it’s no surprise that the bar regulars hang on his every word, just as J.R. does.

 

Affleck’s line deliveries invariably include a trace of New York sass or snark, stopping just short of smugness. Charlie is never condescending; he grants respect to all who deserve it. (J.R.’s estranged father, who drops in just often enough to disappoint the boy further, is one of the exceptions.)