Tom & Viv: A Review

TOM & VIV

I know that many people find poetry boring. I know that many people find T.S. Eliot incomprehensible. I now think that if any of those people end up watching Tom & Viv, they may find themselves justified in their opinions. Unbearably slow, unbearably boring, Tom & Viv plays to all the worst tropes of Oscar-bait biopics and maybe throws in a few new tropes just for fun.

American expatriate Thomas Eliot (Willem Dafoe) is an aspiring poet. This restrained young man is in love with outrageous free-spirit Vivienne Haigh-Wood (Miranda Richardson). Our English rose is also interested in this Yank, and to coin a phrase, they got married in a fever as they elope. Vivienne's family is displeased by this, but not strictly because the idea of elopement is tawdry to them. In truth, her brother Maurice (Tim Dutton) and her mother Rose (Rosemary Harris) are concerned for Vivienne's mental health.

As well they should be, for Viv is pretty much bonkers. She, based on the film, would have today been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but at the time was thought to have some physical ailment that has her act irrationally. Viv is very mercurial in her manner with Tom. Sometimes she is his fiercest champion, almost screaming at everyone including him that he is the greatest poet in all human history. Sometimes she is vicious towards him, such as pouring melted chocolate into his office's mailbox when his office won't let her in. Occasionally running to her sole friend Louise (Clare Holman) for comfort, Viv also attacks other friends like Virginia Woolf (Joanna McCallum). These are literal attacks, with Viv pulling a knife on Woolf and others in the street, insisting to them that she is not Mrs. Eliot.

Even after his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Tom finds life with Viv nearly impossible. Eventually, the family, albeit reluctantly, decides it is best to institutionalize Viv in an asylum. There, she lives out the rest of her life as T.S. Eliot's first wife, never divorcing but never seeing each other again.

Right from the get-go, one senses that Tom & Viv thought more highly of itself than the final product turned out to be. Debbie Wiseman's lush, grand score suggests a great tragic romance. Once we get past the elegant music and Martin Fuhrer's pretty cinematography, the audience is in for almost two hours of a snoozefest, a slow, boring and overacted film that tells us nothing about T.S. or Vivienne Eliot.

The fault for this disaster is shared between director Brian Gilbert and cowriter Michael Hastings, who adapted his own play and had Adrian Hodges cowrite the screenplay. Hastings and Hodges fail to translate what I presume worked on the stage (not having seen Tom & Viv live myself). So much seems confused and illogical. T.S. Eliot was American, so why does Willem Dafoe spout some vaguely British accent? Why are we not introduced to their mutual friend, Bertrand Russell (Nikolas Grace)? 

Worse, in the opening scene of Tom, Viv, Bertie and Maurice on a riverbank excursion, we get little idea as to whom these people are. It is a guess to figure out why Maurice, whom I do not remember mentioned that he is Vivienne's brother, is telling Russell that he is a virgin and wonders whether Tom and Viv are virgins themselves. In what is meant to be a horrifying scene near the end of the film, Viv pulls out her trusty knife and attacks Rose. Whatever jolt the audience may have at this moment is immediately undercut when it is realized that the knife was a rubber toy knife.

If Tom & Viv was suggesting that somehow Vivienne was aware that these were all pranks, it didn't work. Moreover, even if it a toy knife, lunging these things at people does not make things better. 

There is so much ACTING with a capital A in Tom & Viv that it soon becomes laughable. Both Miranda Richardson and Rosemary Harris received Oscar nominations in Lead and Supporting Actress respectively for Tom & Viv. Harris' nomination is somewhat defensible. She has a great moment near the end of the film, where she contemplates to Tom the difficulty of being a respected and respectable family forced to commit one of their own to a looney bin. OK, she would never have used the term "looney bin" as Rose is far too posh and British for such terminology. You get my point.

There is, however, no justification whatsoever for Miranda Richardson's nomination. Richardson DEVOURS the scenery with crazed, unhinged abandon. Her eyerolling and manic manner in Viv's manic phases made her look as if she were literally possessed by the ghost of Betty Boop. I think Betty Boop would have been more nuanced and restrained than Miranda Richardson was. As she attacked Woolf and her companion, one was not sure if Richardson was playing things straight or playing them for laughs. It was meant, I presume, to be shocking and dramatic. It ended up looking like spoof, as if Vivienne herself was playing a joke that only she was aware of. 

Frankly, I was embarrassed for Miranda Richardson while watching Tom & Viv. There have been bad Best Actress Oscar winners before, let alone bad Best Actress nominations. I think though that Miranda Richardson's failed Oscar bid should rank among the Ten Worst Best Actress Oscar Nominations of All Time.

Willem Dafoe did not get an acting nomination for Tom & Viv. All the better, for he was stilted, boring and lifeless in the role. To be fair, the screenplay did not help him. We do not know, for example, what motivated him to embrace Catholicism. We also do not know why Vivienne attempted to storm into Tom's baptism, how she knew about it, or why there was a priest at the locked door, ready to keep her out of the ceremony. Apart from Harris, everyone's efforts to ACT in Tom & Viv had the opposite result. In that opening scene, I genuinely wondered whether Dafoe, Richardson, Grace or Dutton even knew HOW to act.

Tom & Viv reveals nothing about the tortured romance of the literary giant and the woman who loved and exasperated him. Boring and slow, whether with a bang or a whimper, Tom & Viv is a film to avoid.

T.S. Eliot
1888-1965

Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot:
1888-1947

DECISION: F