Random Notes on THE GREAT LILLIAN HALL
The mystery of love is one we keep tackling. We attempt and we fail, but the role of lover—to anyone or anything—is one of the hardest and the most rewarding. This film conveys that.
So many things are being said about The Great Lillian Hall, the Michael Cristofer film starring Jessica Lange, which premiered on HBO Max May 31st, and most of them are favorable, so it seems churlish to correct some of them. I only make some corrections because by asserting so continually that The Great Lillian Hall is “clearly” based on the final years of actress Marian Seldes, the film, which has a screenplay by the niece of Marian Seldes—Elisabeth Seldes Annacone—is reduced, seen as a “study” or a “peek into” what may have happened to a beloved actress.
The Great Lillian Hall is certainly inspired by Marian Seldes, whom I knew from 1978 until she began to slip away from us in 2011 and 2012. When Marian passed away, in October of 2014, I had not seen or spoken to her in over two years. There were some who continued to visit, but I demurred, when those closest to Marian let me know that the gesture of a visit was lost on her, a phone call frightening and alien, and the effort too much to bear.
What I think I most want to say about The Great Lillian Hall is that it lovingly uses as its source material Marian Seldes, but not only her illness, her final years, but the impact she had on so many. Yes, let us consider that Marian Seldes is the foundation for The Great Lillian Hall, but a glorious edifice has been erected on that foundation, and we owe it to Jessica Lange, Michael Cristofer, Elisabeth Seldes Annacone, and the rest of the film’s cast to spend some time within it.
Marian frequently wondered if art would save her—save us—and it was one of her strongest beliefs that it would. All of us, not just those in the professional pursuit of an art, are saved by exploring what other human beings have placed on canvas, the blank page, the composition sheet, the stage, or pieces of film. We are momentarily taken out of our own reality, but we then have our reality expanded by what others have revealed to us. “I am never lonely,” Marian told me once, “when I can see what someone else has created or shared. I enter into a relationship.” This sentiment is beautifully conveyed in The Great Lilian Hall, and Jessica Lange does a masterly job portraying a woman—an actress—who operates on various levels. There is the actress, all flowing scarves and affectations and courtesies; there is the woman, who loses her way in a script—normally a sanctuary to an actress—on a stage, on the streets of her city of birth, to which she has a relationship as strong as any she had with a loved one; a mother, who, like Marian, often regretted that she was not as available to her daughter as she was to those with whom she worked, those who wrote to her or called her. I know that Marian loved her daughter—she told me this repeatedly—and I know that Lange’s Lillian loves her daughter (a superb Lily Rabe), but there remains a strangeness about these daughters, a distance. In the life of every actress there appear parts that hold a scene, an emotion, an arc, that escapes her: There is simply no connection. Marian felt this way about her role as a mother, and I feel that Lillian Hall has this same painful awkwardness.
Every day we lose a bit of something: Our pride in ourselves and our country. The full use of our physical and mental faculties. Our loved ones—friends and family. This is the terrifyingly beautiful message of The Great Lillian Hall: It all ends, often in a brutal fading. Marian once said in the middle of a conversation that the words were disappearing as if a painter had decided to wipe away what existed on the canvas. “I knew who we were talking about at the beginning,” she said, “and now I don’t even know what we’re saying.”
Our identities are being assaulted at every turn. We live in a society that loves to attack someone—for clicks and views and delight—by asserting that they are not who they claim to be. No evidence is necessary, only envy and malice. This is what the gladiatorial atmosphere of social media and rancid journalism feed to us. We doubt everything. When Lillian Hall feels her words and her life and her connections to those with whom she lives and works are being wiped away, questioned, she lives in a terror we know too well, or soon will. Marian Seldes denied so much of what people chose to believe because it poisoned the reality she best understood, and that included the best of people, who could give us their art, including the art of friendship. “My father,” Marian told me once, “had a true gift of friendship.” So did Marian, and when she could not identify a friend, except by a beard or a John Gielgud imitation, it devastated her. “Am I dying, or did I kill them?” She asked this in 2011.
Jessica Lange is a great actress portraying a great actress, but it is not Marian Seldes. I have no doubt in my mind that Jessica Lange could offer us a Marian, with the voice and the gestures and rampant kindness that was a genuine weapon against the coarser world, but I am happier with the Lillian Hall she has given us. Jessica Lange stands on a foundation that we will call Marian Seldes, but she soars far, far above it. Jessica Lange has given us a performance to study, and each viewing reveals more of what she understands, is unafraid to share, and is rapidly losing. No one, I think I can safely say, would be more impressed than Marian.
Note: Lillian Hall loves her daughter, and her final act is to provide a home, a foundation, a safe place for her. This is a devastating turn in the tale. I know, too, that Marian wanted more than anything to provide a foundation and a safe place to her own daughter, and I am grateful to this film for revealing that. The mystery of love is one we keep tackling. We attempt and we fail, but the role of lover—to anyone or anything—is one of the hardest and the most rewarding, and that is something this film conveys to a shattering degree.
All images courtesy of HBO.