Tom & Viv

After seeing this, I am no longer a TS Eliot fan. He knew the lady's nature, yet demonized her. Turned to religion, yet Dishonored the sanctity of marriage. Let a bit of blood stand between their love. Great poet, lousy man.

The Tom and Viv of the title are T.S. Eliot and his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, played by Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson in an Oscar-nominated performance.

I always come away from bio pics about artists thinking that the people around the artist would make a much more interesting subject for a film, because the artists themselves are usually rather dull. It's refreshing, then, that this film focuses much more on Vivienne and her struggles with mental illness than it does on the life of Eliot. The film's not entirely successful, but Richardson earned her Best Actress nomination and she's given able support by Rosemary Harris, who plays her mother in couple of brief scenes.

Grade: B

This film demonstrates how easily the state uses the psychiatric profession to unjustly incarcerate citizens, with full permission of family members, and eventually the victim themselves.

The scene of the "mind police" taking Viv (Miranda Richardson) out of a restaurant in broad daylight, and her struggle that ends with pushing her purse into the hands of a friend as she is brought into submission, is heart-wrenching.

I hardly recognized Willem Dafoe in this biopic about T.S. Eliot and his mentally ill wife Vivian. His face was very long, thin, and gaunt; with every lean on his cane Dafoe managed to capture the weariness Eliot must have felt. Miranda Richardson plays his wife, his poetic inspiration, his chief critic; however she suffers from an illness given a ridiculously silly name and tries to kill herself often. Today she would have been put on prozac and given a spot on Ricki Lake. But since this was post WWI-era, we instead get to watch Viv wave a gun around and pour melted chocolate into a mailslot. The movie takes place for the most part in London, moving to America when Eliot takes a position at Harvard. The other characters, a priest, a family friend, and a few socialites, seemed cardboard and uninteresting. This is not a fast-moving film; at times the sound was terrible and the plot a little confusing. We're never really quite sure what is making Vivian nuts; but then, I guess that reflects real life. It made for a great rainy afternoon flick, especially for poetry lovers, art lovers, and biography lovers.

The film starts with a passionate embrace between Tom and Viv on the innocent setting of an Oxford punt. For the next quarter of an hour you may think that this will be an ordinary, merchant ivory type film about an upper-crust gal and her american beau writing away their cares in the dreaming spires of Oxford. However the idyllic setting and the gentle breezes soon fade into nothingness and before long you are forced to comprehend the tortured soul of one suffering from mental hysteria and the immediate effects of that on those who are subjected to the outbursts. Miranda Richardson's performance as the highly strung wife of one of our most famous poets, takes this film to another level. Although the story is essentially a simple love story why it sits apart from the rest is purely down to the fact that Tom suffers Viv's neuroses silently like the true English gentleman he has become. Devotees of T.S. Elliot may find that the film is superficial in its reference to his work and that the focus is centered on Viv. Yet at the end of the film I was left with a heightened awareness of what and who might have propelled him to write the way he did. This bitter-sweet film tugs at the heart strings just so.