#67 - Splendor in the Grass

We got us a drama here. No, wait, we gots a Drah-ma. Even better, we actually have a DRAAAAAAAH-muh. It's that classic heavy handed drama from back in the Tennessee Williams/Arthur Miller days. These are the kinds of things that I always found easier to watch than read. Reading these plays was a good way to get my mind to wander or just fall asleep. It doesn't matter if they were well written classics with dynamic characters and hard hitting subject matter for the time they were written, they made me pass out. And boy, talk about still being hard to watch. I have only seen a few performances of plays from this time period and I would say that just one really grabbed me like it should have and thats because the actors in the lead roles were at the top of their game. In other words, these plays were always hard to read, and hard to stage. But we got some heavy hitters here, even if the director was a rat.

So, what do we have here in this draaaaaaaaaaaah-ma? We have a boy. We have a girl. And of course one is rich and the other is not. Remember the time period it was written in. Its practically a given that there would be some economic thing going on. And of course there are meddling parents that make things worse while trying to reassert their traditions in their children. I don't even know if "reassert" is the right word, but I used it cause what really matters is that the parents are stubborn, don't listen and do a good job of making their kids lives miserable because they try to force a tradition of life that the children don't want. Women act a certain way and don't marry because of love, they marry because of duty. Men follow in their fathers footsteps which in this case means Ivy League college and taking over the family business.

Before I go further, I want to say that this is a good movie, with great directing and good acting, but I do have issues with it, which are probably just me and not the movie. First of all, I don't think it was neccessarily adapted from the stage play that well. By that I mean that it had clearly divided scenes and acts that are just fine on stage, but didn't quite translate over to film for me. I think it has to do with the fact that it was filmed like you would film a screenplay, but using a stage play. Look at my Men of Respect review, same kind of problem.

Something occurred to me while I watched this movie. Why do all of the female characters from this period go insane over love or a lack therof? Like I said, I havent seen too many things from this period, but the ladies in the ones I have seen go fucking nuts and I am at a loss to figure out why this is so common. Is this the only way we knew how to let women be dramatic for a change? Sure, this movie brings up issues of women settling for marriages of duty as oppossed to love and then living a life of servitude because those are the traditional feminine roles in society, but I think it's a more damaging thing to have women go apeshit crazy when they don't have either. Oh my god. I just described Ophelia. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

In summary, it's well made movie, but if you want to see something about youthful dreams losing their luster as life happens, watch The Last Picture Show.