Tom & Viv

There is much to appreciate intellectually but little to engage with emotionally in this overlong account of the thirty-plus year marriage of T.S. Eliot (Willem Dafoe) to Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot (Miranda Richardson). The film begins with their 1915 courtship when both were in their twenties, and ends around the time of the Second World War. Whilst impressing in terms of production design, wardrobe and so forth, the dramatic substance of the story never manages to stand alone whilst the main reason for the film's existence in the first place, Eliot's poetry, receives no more than passing attention.

Partly the film founders due to the mis-casting of Willem Dafoe as.Eliot. God knows what his accent, which sounds Central European, is about but Dafoe does little through the film but progressively become more lugubriously pious and emotionally robotic in what is a highly unflattering portrait of the poet. Richardson is a far livelier and more sympathetic presence but here the screenplay, by Michael Hastings and Adrian Hodges based on the play by the former, never make clear whether Viv suffers from mental problems or simply the combined effects of the stultifying conventionality of Edwardian English upper class society and medical incompetence that not only failed to recognize a hormonal imbalance but prescribed medication that drove her further off the rails.

Either way there is too little dynamic between the two leads to hold our attention and the film is at best a reasonable exercise in social history.

 

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