MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Tom & Viv’: It’s Not a Marriage Made in Heaven

“Tom & Viv” is a respectable attempt at a difficult subject. It’s about the troubled marriage of T.S. Eliot (Willem Dafoe) and his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood (Miranda Richardson), and the ways in which the trouble inspired the artist.

Based on the Michael Hastings stage play and directed by Brian Gilbert, “Tom & Viv” creaks. It’s in the “Masterpiece Theatre” mode, except it’s no masterpiece. But once you get past the rather uninspired treatment--the way each scene appears to be hermetically sealed--the film begins to work anyway. Gilbert and Hastings, along with co-screenwriter Adrian Hodges, don’t set up Tom and Viv as icons. Most Hollywood movies about famous artists show us people who knew they were living great and famous lives that one day would be made into movies.

“Tom & Viv” takes almost the opposite approach: The sorrowing lives that we see are so miserably confused and painful that the characters seem in danger of going up in smoke before our eyes. Vivienne, the free spirit with her battery of psychological and physical problems, has lows that cancel out her highs; Tom plods through most of the movie like an undertaker at his own funeral. We’re not exactly in Scott and Zelda country.

Tom is first introduced to Vivienne at Oxford in 1914, and their courtship is freewheeling and a little dizzying for both of them. Clearly Tom is enraptured by her manic gambols, and it’s pretty funny watching this musty man attempting to keep up with her. But when he leaves Oxford to elope with her, their honeymoon turns into a nightmarish episode that sets the tone for a marriage that lasted more than 20 years.

Vivienne’s long-term suffering with an out-of-control menstrual cycle, coupled with the toxicity of her prescribed medications, keeps her spinning more and more into mania as the years progress. Along with her brother, Maurice (Tim Dutton), who narrates the film, Tom finally commits her to an asylum in 1936. (She died in 1947.)

The pathos of the marriage is counterbalanced by the ardor that fired it. The filmmakers’ approach is evenhanded: They don’t assign blame to either Tom or Vivienne for what happened. (If anything, they blame the medical authorities who failed to diagnose the biophysical nature of Viv’s mental imbalance.) Even when we observe Vivienne puttering in placid comfort in the asylum, still adoring the husband who hasn’t communicated with her in 10 years, it’s impossible to affix blame. Perhaps that’s because in Tom’s deep-set eyes we can see the weight of remorse and sadness--and the love--that Vivienne still inspires in him.

The filmmakers want to present Vivienne as Tom’s angel--his muse. And here the movie begins to stretch its good will. Much is made of how she “understood” his poetry, how she came up with the title for “The Wasteland.” The pathos of their marriage is translated into Tom’s inspiration--and that’s a pretty shaky formulation. It’s also offensively reductive: The correspondence between an artist’s inner life and his outer one is far too complicated and discontinuous for such a treatment.

And it’s particularly dubious in the case of T.S. Eliot because he was a sufferer from way back--his first poem, written when he was 9, was about the sadness of returning each Monday to school. The greatness of a poem like “The Wasteland” takes in so much of the modern condition (even now) that the film’s attempt to scrunch its meanings into the framework of a bad marriage seems foolish. Sometimes the high brow on this film is set awfully low.

With the exception of Bertrand (Bertie) Russell and a few cameos from Bloomsbury types like Virginia Woolf, “Tom & Viv” seems distinctly underpopulated with great and famous names. The filmmakers want to focus on the marriage, but the narrowness doesn’t do justice to the other influences in Eliot’s life--Ezra Pound, for example, who rescued the poet and his art many times, is nowhere to be found.

Dafoe does surprisingly well as Eliot, though it’s such a reactive role that most of the time he’s virtually immobile. Dafoe actually resembles--or is made to resemble--Eliot in all his whorled, fluted handsomeness. He has a shadowed gravity that goes well with the poetry. But the stand-out performances belong to Richardson and to Rosemary Harris as Vivienne’s mother.

Harris gives such delicacy and understanding to her role that it transforms the movie’s meanings. At first, the character she is playing seems stuffy and over-refined but then we see that the stuffiness is a camouflage for her caring. Her lifelong concern for Vivienne is in her every gesture; she’s infinitely tolerant of her daughter’s upsets and yet they drag her way down. It’s a great, valiant small performance.

And Richardson, who played the role in a BBC radio dramatization, is superb. She doesn’t go hog-wild in her ups and downs--even at her giddiest we can spot Vivienne’s suffering, and her despair carries a trace of jest. Vivienne’s unquenchable love for Tom seems, finally, heroic. Richardson shows us the sane, composed, ardent woman that was nestling inside Vivienne all along.

* MPAA rating: PG-13, for thematic elements. Times guidelines: It includes a bloody menstruation sequence and scenes of madness.

‘Tom & Viv’

Willem Dafoe: Tom Eliot

Miranda Richardson: Vivienne Haigh-Wood

Rosemary Harris: Rose Haigh-Wood

Tim Dutton: Maurice Haigh-Wood

A Miramax films and Entertainment Film Distributors presentation of a Samuelson Productions Harvey Kass and IRS Media INC production with the participation of British Screen. Director Brian Gilbert. Producers Marc Samuelson, Harvey Kass, Peter Samuelson. Executive producers Miles A. Copeland III, Paul Colichman. Screenplay by Michael Hastings and Adrian Hodges. Cinematographer Martin Fuhrer. Editor Tony Lawson. Costumes Phoebe De Gaye. Music Debbie Wiseman. Production design Jamie Leonard. Set decorator Jill Quertier. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

* In limited release at the Goldwyn Pavilion Cinemas, Westside Pavilion, Pico between Westwood and Overland, West Los Angeles, (310) 475-0202.