February 5, 1988 | Right at the start of The Glass Menagerie, one of the most lyrical dramas in the American theatrical canon, Tennessee Williams promises an evening of beautiful artifice. But in that promise, delivered by Tom, the playwright’s surrogate, there lies a threat: “I am the opposite of a stage magician,” Tom says. “He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
Glass Menagerie is a memory play, an autobiographical reverie in which Williams — embittered and witheringly ironic, yet also sympathetic and racked by guilt — considers his past and its grip on his present. He recalls the not-so-quiet desperation of his Depression Era days, when he labored by day in a St. Louis shoe factory, and when by night he felt the walls closing in, inch by inch, as he wrote in anxious obscurity.
Most of all, he remembers his sister, a frail flower who would never bloom amid the miseries of a workaday world. At the end, Tom, the play’s narrator, is waiting, praying, for the candle of her memory to fade, to free him of the guilt he continues to feel for abandoning her.
But the candle will never go out.
As a memory play, Tom tells us, Glass Menagerie “is sentimental, it is not realistic.” And for that reason, your heart may sink a little during the opening minutes of the new film version of Williams’ play. Directed by Paul Newman, this Glass Menagerie begins in a harshly realistic set, a ramshackle tenement, where John Malkovich, pale-complexioned and spooky-eyed, races through Tom’s introduction as though the words were prose, not poetry. When this Tom speaks of “the pleasant disguise of illusion,” you have to wonder just what this man is talking about.
But as Tom joins the other characters in the past he is recalling, something strange and wonderful starts to happen. As the memory play sparks to life, as Michael Ballhaus’ restless camera prowls the Depression Era apartment like a caged animal — like Tom, really — this Glass Menagerie gradually, mesmerizingly, evolves into a thing of beauty.
Years ago, Newman, as a virile young actor, played Brick in a very timid movie version of Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Here, as a compassionate director, Newman repays his debt to the playwright with a film that will be the yardstick by which all future productions of The Glass Menagerie will be measured.
And Joanne Woodward, Newman’s wife and frequent collaborator, is an Amanda Wingfield for the ages. A paragon of fading Southern gentility, Amanda can be played, wrong-headedly, as a senile and self-deceiving old fool, or an obsessively domineering harpy. But Woodward — a much younger and more vital Amanda than we usually see — wisely avoids both extremes.
Instead, Woodward gives us a dynamic woman who cherishes memories of her Old South past, but who remains painfully, frantically aware of her current low state. She worries about her children, and smothers them with a love she hopes will keep them warm. Amanda is sweet and often silly, but she remains at heart a steel-willed survivor. She sees right through Tom, her son, and recognizes in him the same footloose discontent she saw in her husband. OK, she figures, Tom will leave. But before he goes, Tom should — no, he must — make provisions for his sister, Laura, a tremulously shy, partially crippled young woman who lacks Amanda’s fortitude.
What little plot there is to The Glass Menagerie turns on a fateful dinner. Tom, genuinely fond of his sister, and perhaps a little guilty about his impending departure, invites home one of his co-workers, Jim, a one-time high school hero. Jim is puffed up with self-confidence, and rather too glib with his peppy, go-for-it philosophy. But he’s basically a decent fellow, maybe just the “gentleman caller” that Laura needs.
The film, like the play, flows inexorably to a superbly written, delicately nuanced interlude, nearly a half-hour long. Jim and Laura, left alone after Jim enjoys Amanda’s cheery hospitality, talk. He talks of big plans, of conquering new worlds; she listens, warily emerging from her shell. Expectations are raised, then dashed. No one means any harm, but Laura, as delicate as the glass animals she lovingly collects, is shattered.
Karen Allen is exquisitely moving as Laura. No longer young, yet still a child at heart, the character is utterly terrified by life. Allen touches our hearts as Laura is lulled out of her fears, then breaks our hearts as the terrors close in on her again.
James Naughton makes a fine, full-bodied Jim, affable and well-intentioned as he inadvertently causes the most devastating pain. Jim has his own illusions, of course, but Naughton never denies the character his dignity. It’s not really Jim’s fault that, literally and figuratively, he smashes the glass figurine.
John Malkovich has trouble with the first scene, though it’s likely as much Newman’s fault as his own. But as the film gradually, insistently brings us into the melancholy rhythms of Williams’ poetry, Malkovich rises to the challenge of his role. He vividly illuminates the many contradictions of Tom, playing him as both weak and rebellious, angry and anguished, self-aggrandizing and self-loathing. It is an excellent performance, altogether worthy of this exemplary production.
