MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Sad Cafe’ Stirs Southern Discomfort

Carson McCullers’ slim literary output has been the occasion for at least two wonderful films: the 1952 “Member of the Wedding” and the 1967 “Reflections in a Golden Eye.” The latest McCullers’ adaptation, “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe” (at the AMC Century 14), comes at a time when her literary reputation is at an unjustifiably low ebb.

Too many good writers have had their reputations downsized by the mediocre movies made of their work. It would be a shame if people unfamiliar with McCullers’ books took this movie as an example of what she is all about. It’s not so much that the movie, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Keith Carradine, distorts the novella’s themes; it’s just that certain themes don’t survive the transition from literature to film. The Southern Gothic fairy-tale mythology that had a dreamlike power on the page looks stilted and phony on the screen. Mythological characters, at least of the human variety, are perhaps better imagined than seen.

The actor Simon Callow, directing his first feature, draws on McCullers’ novel and Edward Albee’s 1963 stage adaptation. The film, structured as one long flashback, moves at a painstakingly portentous pace, as we follow the awful odyssey of Miss Amelia (Redgrave), a lanky, big-boned woman who was the central attraction in a small Georgia town before being capsized by fate. As the town’s cafe proprietress, makeshift physician and champion moonshiner, Amelia is the most daunting thing that ever happened to this sleepy, creepy backwater.

When a hunchback dwarf (Cork Hubbert) staggers into town claiming to be Amelia’s cousin, this imperious woman surprises the dumbstruck townsfolk by taking him in. She and Cousin Lymon become an improbably companionable pair. Then Amelia’s long-ago husband Marvin Macy (Keith Carradine) saunters back into her life after a stretch in the penitentiary, itching to revenge himself on the woman who turned him out on their wedding night and humiliated him in front of the town.

If Callow had approached the McCullers’ material with a visual lyricism to match the lyricism of her prose, he might have come up with a more energetic movie (Times-rated Mature for occasional violence). But Callow doesn’t have the movie-making skills to put his magic across. He falls back on a stock catalogue of cliches: clouds passing across a full moon, branches trembling in the wind, and so on.

Maybe the only way to make this story work on screen is to be frankly fantastic; by trying to have it both ways, by attempting to be both lyric and hard-edged, Callow ends up with a soupy fairy tale.

His cast seems caught in the same double bind. They’re trying to be both real people and mythological creatures, and the attempt is particularly frustrating because it’s never really clear what they’re supposed to be mythologizing. It wasn’t clear with McCullers either but, in reading her novella, you don’t want the meanings pinned down. Seeing these larger-than-life characters on the big screen lends itself to the kind of literalism that helps kill the story’s mysteriousness.

Still, the casting of Redgrave and Carradine is astute. Carradine has a muscled lankiness to match hers, and his faraway edginess, his slow-fuse malevolence, keeps the movie on edge. Carradine always seems a bit otherworldly in his movies, which is why an otherworldly director like Alan Rudolph is so fond of him, and so he fits into McCullers’ universe without much fuss.

Redgrave does too, although she can’t do much with her scenes with Cousin Lymon--she can’t forge an emotional bond because empathy is outside the role’s requirements. Redgrave was surprisingly effective on Broadway last year in Tennessee Williams’ “Orpheus Descending.” It’s possible that this great, gracefully gawky British actress is drawn to Southern Gothic in a way that American actors aren’t. She lurches into the terrain with an impassioned sense of premonition and fear, as if she was dream-walking into the heart of darkness. If there was ever an actress to make the mythic real, it’s Redgrave. “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe” is redeemed by her presence.

‘The Ballad of the Sad Cafe’

Vanessa Redgrave Miss Amelia

Keith Carradine Marvin Macy

Cork Hubbert Cousin Lymon

Rod Steiger Reverend Willin

An Angelika Films release. Director Simon Callow. Producer Ismail Merchant. Executive producer Paul Bradley. Screenplay Michael Hirst. Cinematographer Walter Lassally. Editor Andrew Marcus. Costumes Marianna Elliott. Music Richard Robbins. Production design Bruno Santini. Art director Michael T. Roberts. Set decorator Scott Hale. Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

Times-rated Mature (occasional violence).