Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays depressed readers in 1970; the screenplay by Miss Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, offers no relief now. In the clutches of director Frank Perry, this modern allegory of unrelieved boredom and near solipsism comes no closer than the novel to probing beneath the surface of the contemporary malaise, affluent Weltschmerz; indeed, made visual, it barely nicks the skin. Ex-actressex-model Maria Wyeth Lange’s burrow into her own vacantness depended for what little conviction it mustered in the book on moments of perceptive writing. Now that’s gone, and with it, any interest but the necrophilic. Maria mucks up her marriage, aborts her lover’s child, fails to reconcile with her self-loving husband, and chooses for solace a buddy, B. Z. Mendenhall, already resigned to a life dwelling on the pit’s edge. She winds up in the contemporary Purgatory, subjected to an endless battery of psychological tests.
Tuesday Weld as Maria stares and flips her lovely hair, thereby exhausting her stock of creative tricks. A moment or two of High Bitchery from Tammy Grimes as B. Z.’s wife, and perhaps ten minutes of Anthony Perkins (Weld’s co-star in Pretty Poison, 1968) as the elegant wastrel B. Z., contribute all the acting graces this film receives. Every whipped cliche of montage this side of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point passes before us: oh look at the highway signs, oh catch the Rorschach blots; oh just see those cocktail party chatter numbers, oh. Despair can be intriguing, but Play It as It Lays sheathes despair in ennui bathed in the immediacy of banality.
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