Based on the long lost screenplay from celebrated playwright Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)!
Something Old and Something New from Tennessee Williams
Amos Lassen
It has been a long time since we have heard from Tennessee Williams and that is because he has been dead for quite a while now. Recently the script of "The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond" was found and a movie was made and we have a new Williams production with the same themes for which he was so famous. His voice has called to us across the years since his death and in "The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond" is a prize with a wonderful performance by Ellen Burstyn as Aunt Addie but more about that in a few.
Fisher Willow (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a disliked Memphis debutante in the 1920's. She loves to shock and insult those around her and has no patience for those with narrow minds. When she returns from Europe, she falls in love with Jimmy Dobyne (Chris Evans). The son of an alcoholic father and an insane mother and he, himself, is down on his luck. She attempts to tell her spinster Aunt (Burstyn) that he is from the upper-class as her aunt controls her family fortune. But then she loses a family heirloom, a priceless diamond earring and a series of betrayals and accusations begins that could ruin her future. This is a story of seduction and loss set against the old South and is typical Williams fare--soft summer nights, the river, rich Southern girls, a poor honest boy, drug addiction, etc.
Burstyn as Aunt Addie plays her part from her sick bed while at the same time a debutante party is going on downstairs. She calls Fisher to her room and asks her to give her pills that will take her life. Downstairs is Jimmy, a good-looking guy that Fisher has hired to bring her to the party. His family has fallen on hard times and Addie senses that not all is going well on their date and she has discovered that Jimmy did not want to kiss Fisher and Addie suggests that she return to Europe where she can be free.
Howard as Fisher plays an impulsive, emotionally unstable heiress recklessly defying the hidebound conventions of 1920s Memphis high society. She is a typical wounded Williams angel but without the tragic dimension of Williams' greatest creation, Blanche DuBois. "The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond" is significant but not a great look at reclamation and redemption.
Fisher is rebellious, so much so that she cannot fit comfortably into any social niche. She studied at the Sorbonne, dabbled in painting, and flitted through European bohemian salons and she is a conspicuously cosmopolitan presence in the provincial kind of Southern society that Williams views with contempt. Her family name has suffered because several tenant farmers drowned in a flood that was caused by Fisher's father when he wrecked a levee. Cornelia (Ann-Margaret) controls the family fortune and she has left Fisher know that she will inherit nothing if she doesn't settle down and marry respectably.
Most of the story takes place at a Halloween party where Fisher loses an earring worth 00 and had been lent to her by Cornelia.
Like in other Williams' works, the cast is replete with dreamers and poets who wander through life never finding their places and they are always misunderstood.
A Bejeweled Masterwork - Brian Morgan - New Orleans
Tennessee Williams is the heart, mind, and voice of the South, and Jodie Markell has made an extraordinarily beautiful film of his screenplay, "The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond." Exquisite in its detail and dramatic force, the director does not shy away from Williams's view of a rotting, decadent, romantic Gothic Southland. And in Bryce Dallas Howard (with alabaster skin and raven-black hair) and Chris Evans, she has possibly the most handsome cinematic-couple since Dame Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in "A Place in the Sun." This film is a great achievement, not to be missed.
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