Tom and Viv.

Walking out of the theater exhibiting Tom and Viv, the film about the unhappy union of T.S. Eliot and Vivien Haigh-Wood, I entertained a strange fantasy which I shall now inflict on you. Envision, please, a marriage counselor, moistly sympathetic in mien and possessing the most soothing of voices, seated at his desk and gravely listening to the woes of his latest clients. Turning from wife to husband and back again, the marital mediator bestows his goodwill with perfect equity and censures no one. Their sad story told, the two sit in a state of near-collapse and await professional judgment. But no judgment comes, only all-embracing sympathy. "Nothing can be done but no one is to blame," the counselor intones. "No one can be blamed in these calamitous unions of incompatibles. But never fear. Your marriage may be over but your lives are not. Go from this office into your futures, and take with you my assurance that for all the arguments, the public embarrassments and flights of madness you have inflicted on each other, I have heard the unmistakable note of mutual love. There is no villain here, only two admirable, inevitable victims." The clients, a bit stupefied, perhaps, by such illimitable empathy, arise and turn to exit.

Suddenly, the counselor leaps over his desk and plunges his letter opener in the husband's back! Exulting over the corpse, he grins at the shocked wife, "Something you should have done a long time ago, deary."

Well, that's Tom and Viv for you. Its writers, Michael Hastings and Adrian Hodges (adapting Hastings's play), proceed for some time as if they were treating both participants in a conjugal catastrophe with equal compassion, but all the while they're sharpening their knives to skin Old Possum.

The first quarter of the movie, though not really gripping, is amiable, promising, attractive. The casting of Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson in the leads works quite well at the start. Though Dafoe was last seen machine-gunning his foes in the excellent espionage thriller, A Clear and Present Danger, he here conveys quite deftly both the fragility of Eliot's physique and the powerfully grinding mill of his mind. When the young scholar-poet looks out of a classroom window to gaze lovingly at the flapper Vivien hailing him from a moving car, we understand quite well the mutual attraction of these opposites. Dafoe's charming reserve and Richardson's equally engaging skittishness make us want to follow this couple as they seek out a life together. Terrible things may be in store for them, but the quality of the acting promises some revelations about human nature in extremis.

And the beginning of their woes, a wedding night wrecked by her hormonal imbalance and his revulsion-induced impotence, is staged by director Brian Gilbert with an economy that is both tactful and powerful. The camera moves through their hotel bedroom, pans over hastily cast-off garments, then freezes at the sight of Eliot gazing dejectedly out a window. After the usual guilty reassurances--"I know I can make you happy," "Please! I'm not blaming you," etc., etc.--he leaves for a walk but pauses to lean on the other side of the door in baffled longing; the director cuts to Vivien crouching inside, equally longing. It's an affecting moment.

Alas, nearly the last one in the movie. As we follow the marriage deeper and deeper into misery, we seem to be pushed further and further back from the characters. Vivien's slide into madness isn't just quick, it's precipitous, accomplished by the filmmakers mere minutes after the wedding-night scene. Miranda Richardson's specialties--brittle playfulness, barely leashed hysteria, feminist outrage--are all called for here, but with a vengeance, too much of a vengeance. Richardson is masterly as she taunts her husband and parents at dinner, peering over her plate at her victims like a demented crane. And her outbursts have all the high decibel fury Richardson always has at her command. Trouble is, that's all she's called upon to deliver. There's nowhere for her to go with her performance once our heroine unravels. At one point, Vivien confesses that sometimes she can hear the craziness of what she says, and that interesting remark suggests an aspect of their heroine that the filmmakers might have explored: pent-up sanity watching unleashed dementia within the same psyche. But that possibility isn't pursued. We are instead offered the titillations of crazy antics: Vivien trying to break into Eliot's publishing offices and pouring liquid chocolate through the keyhole when she's locked out; Vivien brandishing a knife at Virginia Woolf, etc., etc. Unless a writer or director can get inside madness and illuminate that awful terrain (as Shakespeare did in Lear or Ingmar Bergman did in Persona), insanity on stage or screen is nothing but a freak show.

But Willem Dafoe's plight is worse than Richardson's. She, at least, can show some flash and fire, but Dafoe, after a good start, is allowed only to slump, drone, and look baleful. It's not his fault that the script gives his talent no scope. If the filmmakers had really been attuned to Eliot, really curious about the many-sided spirit that dwelt behind his detached demeanor (V.S. Pritchett called the poet "a company of actors inside one suit, each twitting the other...."), monotony would not have doused Dafoe's performance.

As it is, Vivien flails, Tom quails, and the audience is left stranded.

In the last twenty minutes, however, the scriptwriters, as if awakening to the pointlessness of their work, try to recharge their project with the adrenaline of blame. At the (virtual) last minute a villain is found on whom the audience can fasten as the source of the woe that is this marriage. And, of course, that villain, in our age of pedestal pulverization, has got to be T.S. Eliot. How do the moviemakers tardily, hastily, and unmistakably indict him?

Nobody in the film, including Vivien's doctors, can understand the basis of her mental instability since it simply hadn't been discovered yet. Eliot certainly isn't to blame for putting his wife in a comfortable place (more of a health spa, as shown here, than an asylum) where she can receive, if not a cure, then at least the sort of care he can't give her. (In real life, it wasn't Eliot who committed his wife.) But, according to the film, when Vivien recovers her sanity after menopause (the hormonal problem having abated), there is no husband around to effect her release, for Eliot has refused to visit her for years. This cruel abandonment is the sin for which the moviemakers indict Eliot. And what do they adduce as Eliot's motive for such cruelty?

It comes out in a scene between Eliot and Viv's mother, the latter presented by both script and actress Rosemary Harris as a paragon of compassion and clear-sightedness. She denounces Eliot for his connections to Bloomsbury. "Once those Bloomsbury types got ahold of you," she claims that he ceased being the sort of man who would keep the promise he made to Mrs. Haigh-Wood always to stand by her daughter. To please some effete types who spend their time "writing nasty novels about their friends," Eliot has thrown his wife to the psychiatric wolves. I may have heard a feeble protest pass Willem Dafoe's lips at this moment, but I don't really think so. Mrs. Haigh-Wood, presenting herself and her family as the cream of England's gentry, exposes Eliot as a calculating American snob breaking into England's cultural establishment. And, the way the scene is written and played, Mrs. Haigh-Wood seems to be speaking for the moviemakers.

The entire scene is sheer philistine fudge. Bloomsbury--though hardly the cultural establishment--was certainly snobbish and cliquish, but the portrayal here of Virginia Woolf as a sort of Margaret Dumont matron betrays a vulgarity that condemns itself. And "nasty novels about...friends" hardly describes the productions of Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, or E.M. Forster. Furthermore, Eliot must have been conscious of Bloomsbury's scorn for Vivien years before the break-up. Yet he not only stuck by her but showed her the greatest affection until his love ceased.

And why did it cease? Nobody really knows. The poet was as complex a man as ever lived, and his torment must have been the most ocmplex thing about him. To find a real, coherent story in the dissolution of this marriage, the moviemakers would have had to be the sort of artists who never settle for easy explanations. But easy explanations abound in Tom and Viv, abetted by glib dialogue, routine plot development, and plush, mostly bland direction. Tom and Viv manages the almost impossible feat of being sedate, confused, and malign--all at once.