After a long day at work, we may not instinctively leap to films about toxic marriages and relationship breakdowns – but by God they can make good drama. Blue Valentine, The Squid and the Whale and A Separation are some of the great portraits of love turned septic. But perhaps greatest of all is Mike Nichols’ directorial debut – a sizzling adaptation of Edward Albee’s legendary Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which arrived in 1966, four years after the play, and helped cement it in the zeitgeist.
The film was nominated for every eligible Academy award and won five, including best actress for Elizabeth Taylor, who delivers a searing performance as the ferocious yet vulnerable Martha. It’s lost none of its gut-busting charge today and her brilliantly performed experience still crackles with emotional electricity.
The drama takes place over the course of one long booze and bile-filled evening between Martha and her husband, George, played by an equally astonishing Richard Burton. Watching him and Taylor go at it is a masterclass in screen acting – if not a bit unpleasant.
It doesn’t take long for the principal characters to start sniping, and things get very nasty very quickly. Take, for example, their equivalent of pillow talk: lying in bed, Martha tells George “you’re going bald”, to which he responds “so are you” – and not in a gently ribbing way. When she tells him she can drink him under the table, he shoots back: “There isn’t an abomination award going that you haven’t won.”
Their dynamic in these early scenes is testy, even volcanic, but nothing compared with what’s coming when they’re joined later in the evening by a much younger married couple: Nick (George Segal) – who works in the same university as George – and Honey (Sandy Dennis). It’s perhaps not Martha and George’s finest hour, though it’s hard to imagine them as paragons of virtue even while sober. In fact, they’re living testaments to that old saying: “misery likes company”. These are not people who are prepared to drink by themselves or sit and stew; they want to share their pain and bring others down with them.
There are only four characters, with one very interesting exception: Martha and George’s son, whose presence hangs over everything despite him never being named or seen – or even existing. Early on, Martha mentions him to Honey, telling her that his 16th birthday is the following day. This upsets George, and we later realise that merely mentioning their son betrays a special pact between them.
It’s famously revealed, deep into the runtime, that this son is a fiction shared between them: a protective shield, perhaps, distracting them from their loneliness and emotional seclusion. The meaning of this twist, though, is up for grabs, enabling all sorts of readings about the story’s metaphorical essence. The Guardian’s Michael Billington described it as being in part about “the stock American theme of truth and illusion”, arguing that Nichols’ film stamped the play “in the public mind as a liquor-fuelled marital slugfest”, pushing critical readings away from its commentaries about the state of America.
Maybe that was inevitable, given the immediacy of the film format compared with the very literal distance between the audience and the actors in stage productions. Nichols does indeed get right up in the characters’ faces. Sometimes the frame moves slowly, and sometimes in sharp and unexpected ways; sometimes the camera is fixed and sometimes it swings madly about. Always, the staging feels closely tuned to the performers, sometimes very uncomfortably so; you can practically smell the rancidness of their breath.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is available to stream on HBO Max in Australia and available to rent in Australia, the UK and the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
