In “The Great Lillian Hall,” Jessica Lange plays a veteran theater actress and legend of the Broadway stage. The reason I play a character like Blanche DuBois is because there's actually a lot of Blanche in it. (They believe in her own fantasy.) But just because Lillian Hall is her gorgeous grandmother doesn't mean she doesn't show it for who she is. Lange, a 75-year-old beauty, has a face that becomes more expressive with each passing year. In “The Great Lillian Hall,” the face is a map of the emotions we read. Even when Lillian deceives (even when she deceives herself), the grandeur of her feelings shines through.
There's a touching scene where Lillian sits on the front porch with her adult daughter Margaret (Lily Rabe), whom she never had time to see when she was raising her. She was always acting, performing eight times a week. But at night she came home on time and sang little Margaret to sleep, and now she sings the same song softly on the front porch. “Shh, baby, don’t cry…” ” What we see and hear in Jessica Lange, now with her voice cracked with age and emotion as delicate as parchment, are three levels of perception. Lillian says she now regrets how absent her mother was. And something new, a quiet sadness over the fact that she is now leaving for a place from which she will never return. Because no one knows that she has been diagnosed with dementia.
There are quite a few film dramas dealing with dementia these days, and they're on the record as being both moving and dramatically frustrating at times. As the protagonist withdraws, there is a way for that protagonist to withdraw from the audience. “The Great Lillian Hall” solves this problem in a simple way. The film takes place during the early onset of Lillian's symptoms. So while she's rehearsing for a major new Broadway production of Chekhov's “The Cherry Orchard” in which she struggles with memory problems, the movie isn't gothic medicine. A soap opera where she suddenly begins to forget who she is. Rather, it's about how Lillian, carrying this devastating diagnosis, examines who she was and how she makes peace with where she is going.
Her symptoms cause drama during rehearsals. She messes up her lines, she unblocks, she forgets what she's doing, and at one point she literally falls on her face. But her most dramatic symptoms remain offstage. She continues to experience her hallucinations that she is meeting her beloved late husband, Carson (Michael Rose), a theater director who for some reason looks like an elegant European drug trafficker. David (Jesse Williams), the director of 'The Cherry Orchard', hasn't lost faith in Lillian, a downtown star heading to Broadway. But his tough producer (Cindy Hogan) did. She goes on to talk about bringing in her understudy to replace her.
Written by Elisabeth Seldes Annacone and directed by Michael Cristofer, the film is (mostly) a working device. It's all stitched together with gimmicks, like Lillian's neighbor flirting with her on her Central Park South balcony becoming a cornball lothario played with jaded affection by Pierce Brosnan, or Lillian's daughter saying things like: To be my mother. You just wanted to play the part!” Or a black-and-white faux-documentary interview piece that plays like Bob Fosse Gone Cable Lite. It follows you even as you realize that the entire tension over whether Lillian will make it through the rehearsal process and make it on opening night (she is the play's box office draw) is built around a sense of unreality. Could someone as struggling as Lillian really be able to perform this show seven days a week, for months on end?
But Lange's performance is so good that it gives The Show Must Go On's version of a worldly center you can live with and almost believe in. Lillian leaves almost all the work to her veteran assistant, Edith (Kathy Bates). And these two actors have a brutally intimate and intense interaction that can be listened to for hours. There are a few scenes that express the pain of dementia (Lange is powerful in those moments), but 'Great Lillian Hall' is mostly a feel-good movie about turning your life into a lemon through acting. The grand fantasy of Lemonade.