Books, Arts & Manners: Distressing Damsels

The actress-playwright Beth Henley has adapted her charming and successful Crimes of the Heart from stage to screen; the film may succeed thanks to its high-profile stars, but the charm is pretty much gone. Good (as opposed to indifferent) fiction is very hard to translate into film; theater, virtually impossible. But producers, like other people without a taste of their own, are drawn to brand-names, and there is nothing like a Broadway hit, bolstered by Hollywood stars, to start them salivating. Crimes of the Heart, though, is a small, off-beat—you might say off-the-wall—piece of late Southern Gothic, the territory mined to a fare-thee-well by artists and epigones in various media. What saves Miss Henley is a dizzy fragility, the absolute ingenuousness with which she accosts the absurd, the discrepancy between derailed action and demure or winsome words. Precarious words, too, that become flesh more than they do celluloid.

As adapter, Miss Henley did the customary but here unpardonable thing: She opened up her story, beefed up the obvious and skipped over the subtle, and, above all, made visual some things that depend on remaining verbal. Certain cruel grotesqueries thrive as disembodied anecdotes; shown, they become distasteful and indigestible. And as cast (no doubt at the request of the producer, Dino De Laurentiis) with stars whose performances are internecine, this whimsy sinks as surely as if in cement pajamas. As Babe, the youngest of the MaGrath sisters, eccentric down to the very spelling of their name, Sissy Spacek does very nicely in scenes less extreme than the one where, after shooting her prominent but gross husband in the stomach, she makes herself a pitcher of lemonade and offers some to the bleeding man on the floor; Jessica Lange is passable but not very Southern as Meg, the fast middle sister, who went to Hollywood to become a singer and actress, and ended up with office drudgery and a nervous breakdown. And then there is Diane Keaton as Lenny, the eldest: A wallflower and stay-athome, she shuns men and spends long hours at the hospital with dying Old Granddaddy, who brought up these orphaned girls.

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John Simon

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The actress-playwright Beth Henley has adapted her charming and successful Crimes of the Heart from stage to screen; the film may succeed thanks to its high-profile stars, but the charm is pretty much gone. Good (as opposed to indifferent) fiction is very hard to translate into film; theater, virtually impossible. But producers, like other people without a taste of their own, are drawn to brand-names, and there is nothing like a Broadway hit, bolstered by Hollywood stars, to start them salivating. Crimes of the Heart, though, is a small, off-beat—you might say off-the-wall—piece of late Southern Gothic, the territory mined to a fare-thee-well by artists and epigones in various media. What saves Miss Henley is a dizzy fragility, the absolute ingenuousness with which she accosts the absurd, the discrepancy between derailed action and demure or winsome words. Precarious words, too, that become flesh more than they do celluloid.

As adapter, Miss Henley did the customary but here unpardonable thing: She opened up her story, beefed up the obvious and skipped over the subtle, and, above all, made visual some things that depend on remaining verbal. Certain cruel grotesqueries thrive as disembodied anecdotes; shown, they become distasteful and indigestible. And as cast (no doubt at the request of the producer, Dino De Laurentiis) with stars whose performances are internecine, this whimsy sinks as surely as if in cement pajamas. As Babe, the youngest of the MaGrath sisters, eccentric down to the very spelling of their name, Sissy Spacek does very nicely in scenes less extreme than the one where, after shooting her prominent but gross husband in the stomach, she makes herself a pitcher of lemonade and offers some to the bleeding man on the floor; Jessica Lange is passable but not very Southern as Meg, the fast middle sister, who went to Hollywood to become a singer and actress, and ended up with office drudgery and a nervous breakdown. And then there is Diane Keaton as Lenny, the eldest: A wallflower and stay-athome, she shuns men and spends long hours at the hospital with dying Old Granddaddy, who brought up these orphaned girls.