Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The late, great Mike Nichols' directorial debut, his 1966 version of Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? established the film maker as a force to be reckoned with and the movie remains bleakly impressive today.  Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton play Martha and Sam, a married couple locked in a vicious cycle of alcoholism, recrimination, and loathing.  The reasons for their mutual hatred, rage that verges on folie a deux is never established and, indeed, remains somewhat enigmatic since they are an attractive couple and seem intellectually well-matched.  On the simplest level, I suppose that they would do better if they consumed less hard alcohol -- everyone swills gin, brandy, and bourbon. Albee's play, and the film based on it, preserves classical unities -- it takes place between two am and dawn during a single night and plays out in a single location, the home that Martha and Sam share.  (Nichols has opened the play up a bit by staging a scene at a local road-house unconvincingly open for business at 3:00 am.  This addition to the play allows the characters to drive drunk and provides a basis for a lascivious juke-joint dance involving Liz Taylor and George Segal.)  The film's casting is precise and perfect:  Taylor and Burton, who were famously troubled as a couple in real life, provide charisma, terror and pity as the doomed Martha and Sam, figures whose lust and rage and violent antipathy seem like something out of a Greek tragedy -- they are like gods impersonating mere mortals:  nothing can make Liz Taylor look unattractive, even as she sneers and whines and chows down on a drumstick of chicken (which she bites a couple of times and contemptuously tosses aside in her filthy fridge); similarly, no matter how much Burton squints and allows Nichols' savage, analytical lighting to rake across his acne scars, the man remains a great actor, indeed, a great Shakespearian actor with voice and intonation to prove it.  Burton and Taylor bring the inflections of both classical tragedy and Hollywood legend to the film and their sheer star-power can't be eclipsed and accounts for much of the film's emotional force.  Sandy Dennis and George Segal are both irritatingly shallow and callow in comparison to the volcanic eruptions staged by Taylor and Burton -- and this is, also, precisely the effect required by the film.  The young couple make the mistake of visiting Sam and Martha after a drunken faculty party.  Sam and Martha recognize that unless they can entice the young, and innocent (and also troubled) couple into their spectacular sado-masochistic games, they will have no one to torment but one another, certainly a stale pleasure for them by this time.  And so Sam and Martha contrive to keep the young folks on hand as spectators and, sometimes, participants in their dance of death.  The stages of this passion are named after party-games:  Humiliate the Host, Get the Guests, Hump the Hostess, and, then, a final nameless bit of theater that involves a fiction contrived between Sam and Martha, the notion that their fruitless and savage union has somehow resulted in a child, a beautiful son.  The first three stages of the Cross, as it were -- host-humiliation, get the guests, and hostess-humping -- are played out with convincing fury.  On occasion, the characters end up strangling one another in cartoonish, but alarming scenes, that look a little like Homer administering parental discipline to Bart Simpson.  The film's denouement, involving Burton's verbal execution of a fictional son that he and Martha have invented, is unpersuasive and a serious flaw in the both the play and film.  By this time in the morning, after the heroic consumption of booze shown in the film, no one would be able to speak as eloquently and, indeed, with such majestic intonations as the two movie stars.  I can accept this with a willing suspension of disbelief but have greater difficulty with the entire conceit.  Albee, and Nichols start the film on a level of frenzy and rage that would be the culmination of most movies -- there is no "slow-burn" here.  Burton and Taylor leave the party in the film's first shot and warily cross a quadrangle, walking with the wide, rolling gait of punch-drunk fighters, somehow both together but, also, desperately apart.  In their home, Taylor immediately begins to harangue Burton and they start clawing at one another.  The film sounds a single note over and over again and so there is really no way out of it, no exit to the characters'infernal dilemma.  Albee ramps up the antagonism, but can only go so far -- after Segal cuckolds Burton with Taylor, only to be dismissed by her as a sexual "flop" and "house-boy," there's really nowhere else for the film to go.  Indeed, one longs for a little physical violence as a respite from the remorseless emotional carnage.  So Albee has to come up with something even more disturbing, hence, the invention of the imaginary son and his murder by Burton. But none of this makes any sense and so, to use Martha's expression, the film and the play "flops" at its end.  But the movie is essential viewing.  If you haven't seen this picture, you owe it to yourself to take a look.  A lot of people associated with this film won Academy Awards -- none is more deserving than Haskell Wexler for his vividly desolate black and white photography.