Jessica Lange as Lillian Hall, one of the great legends of the American theater, is about to star once again on Broadway, in “The Cherry Orchard.” But she is collapsed on her bed, when Kathy Bates as her long-time assistant Edith angrily confronts her. Edith has stumbled upon the medication that reveals that Lillian has dementia — a condition she has been hiding from everybody.
“There is no way I’m going to let you go out in front of 2,000 people…” Edith begins
“What?” Lillian interrupts. “Broadway theaters don’t have 2,000 seats…”
“…and risk your life and ruin your reputation…”
“The Lyceum only has 950…”
“I don’t care if it’s 47 elves and three gorillas,” Edith explodes. “I’m not going through that. And neither should you. And neither should your audience.”
But Lillian perseveres, with Edith’s help, in “The Great Lillian Hall,” a movie about a fictitious grand dame of the theater, which is currently streaming on Max, with a goodly share of such crackling scenes. It showcases a trio of sensational actresses. Lange, Bates, and Lily Rabe, who plays Lillian’s daughter, are all surely best-known for their screen roles, but they each have been extraordinary as well on stage.
But there is a fourth actress hovering over the movie, not always comfortably. “The Great Lillian Hall” is clearly inspired by the great Marian Seldes, an elegant, erudite actress in the grand style, a veteran of 25 Broadway plays and innumerable accolades. I say clearly because the screenplay is written by Elisabeth Seldes Annacone, Marian’s niece, and there are any number of clues in the film to the connection.
Some are concrete if obscure: “Hall” was the maiden name of Marian’s mother. Some reflect her spirit. Like the fictitious Lillian Hall, Marian Seldes was famous for her dedication to her work; she’s entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the “most durable actress” after appearing in every single performance during the four-year-plus run of “Deathtrap” on Broadway.
Two aspects of Seldes’ personal biography seem to shape much of the movie’s plot. Three years after Seldes died in 2014, at the age of 86, a filmmaker produced a documentary entitled “marian” that her admirers accused of being an “invasion” that focuses on her “slide into dementia.” “The Great Lillian Hall” features a cynical documentary crew filming interviews with Lillian and those who know her. These scenes, interspersed throughout the movie, are presented in black and white, which distinguishes them from all the other scenes — the play rehearsals; Lillian’s everyday interactions; her increasing breakdowns and hallucinations. But it’s easy to believe that the real-life documentary influenced the decision to frame the movie as Lillian’s descent into dementia.
That actual documentary also features Seldes’ only child, who is reportedly quite critical of her mother. I have not seen the 2017 documentary, but in the movie Lily Rabe depicts Lillian’s only child as still angry and upset at her mother for her neglect. (“My mother, the theater: They’re inseparable. There wasn’t room for anything else.”)
There is no point in getting in the middle of the real-life disputes. “The Great Lillian Hall” is presented — and taken — as a work of fiction. It attempts, and often succeeds, in depicting the kind of complicated person who would have the talent and the single-mindedness to become a beloved stage actress, and gives us a glimpse of the culture and business of Broadway. But I did start to wonder why this film feels as much an elegy for the theater as a celebration of it. It seems no coincidence that Lillian’s final play is “The Cherry Orchard,” in which she portrays Lyuba Ranevsky, a Russian aristocrat who loses everything, in a world that no longer has room for her. There’s an obvious effort in the film to establish a parallel between Lillian’s and Lyuba’s losses — but it’s not a stretch to detect an argument in the film that there’s not much room in the world for the art of legitimate theater anymore either. “It’s not called show art, It’s show business,” remarks the play’s producer, with the aptly cold name of Jane Stone (played by Cindy Hogan), whose unsentimental pragmatism mirrors that of the peasant-turned-merchant Lopakhin within “The Cherry Orchard.”
“The Great Lillian Hall” happens to be streaming at an opportune time to refute such an implication. We need look no further than Jessica Lange, who gives a devastating performance in the film — and an even more astonishing performance right now on Broadway in the demanding title role of “Mother Play,” a new play by Paula Vogel. “Mother Play” runs only until Sunday afternoon, June 16. That night, we’ll see whether Jessica Lange wins her second Tony Award (which she certainly deserves), at the annual ceremony streamed on screens that makes the case for a still-vibrant world of the stage.
