The Glass Menagerie shows how one kind of play cannot be recreated
on the screen. No screen adapter is given credit, which seems
right. Paul Newman, who directed, took the Tennessee Williams play
sequentially, leaving the dialogue almost intact, merely
articulating the original into shots and sequences as he went along.
The result, formally, is disastrous. William's "memory play" is
something like Laura's menagerie, a collection of objects made fragile
by time and meant to be viewed within their cabinet -- the embrace of a
stage, proscenium or otherwise. The alteration of that spatial
relationship is very damaging. The structural change into shots and
countershots betrays the shape of the play, no matter how faithful one
is to the dialogue. Moreover, Newman has shot in close-up a great deal,
which changes the moonlit-memory aspect of the play into kitchen-sink
drama. The film almost becomes a Chayefsky opus about a daffy, nagging
mother, her limping daughter, and her shiftless son. This is literally
true, of course, but the literalness squeezes the poignancy out of the
son's remembrance of those days, his sense of what they did to and for
him. This usurpation of mood by detail is heightened through Tony
Walton's designs, which are dominated by depressing golden-brown
wallpaper.
The cast is inadequate. Joanne Woodward, the mother, is an earnest
mechanic. She's intelligent and careful, but nothing wells out of her,
everything is made. John Malkovich, the son, is moderately vivid but is
hindered by mannerisms that imply too high an opinion of himself. James
Naughton, the Gentleman Caller, carries out designs in speech and
movement that have patently been planned. Only Karen Allen, as the
daughter, Laura, comes close to being satisfactory. Allen has summoned
all the genteel fear of life that she could muster and uses it
discreetly, sincerely. But she lacks the essential: a fragility that
should touch us before she speaks a word.
Newman has directed two previous films, Rachel, Rachel and Harry and Son.
I didn't see the second, but I remember the first as having some
fluency. This time he gives us just a filmed record of a stage
production, which this was, like those TV versions of resident theater
productions on PBS.
Copyright © 1987 The New Republic