Word: didion
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PLAY IT AS IT LAYS follows Maria Wyeth, an occasional actress and part-time wife of director Carter Lang, on her descent into herself and her surroundings. When Maria (long "i") arrives at the bottom, the finds nothing, but by then who cares? Certainly not she. Based on Joan Didion's same-titled novel, this is a Hollywood film about Hollywood people. Most of them have knowingly ugly souls; all of them are unhappy. Ambition motors them through their non-lives, and a fondly cultivated sense of insouciance cushions the ride. If Los Angeles ever was Paradise, it's lost...
...JOAN DIDION'S SCREENPLAY transfers many of her book's best elements to the film. Besides emphasizing the film's first-person point of view, Maria's soundtrack commentary fills in gaps where dramatization would only waste time. In the book Maria talked about Carter's first films; here we see and use them to piece together her past. Her descriptions of her mentally disturbed daughter, Kate, find visual equivalents in her visits to the institution where Carter has committed their daughter. On the other hand, with the fast-cut flashbacks to Maria's coerced abortion, the style distracts...
Unfortunately, the freeway scenes don't work, and that is mostly director Frank Perry's fault. Didion evoked a city covered in concrete, highways going from nowhere to nowhere. Perhaps filming that inner vision is doomed to fail, since once we see the traffice, it's too familiar to be as arid as Didion's prose images. Still, Perry's attempts to imitate her taunt staccato sentences with abrupt cutting and flashes to yield signs (symbols, anyone?) just doesn't catch the throbbing pulse of Maria's driving--her personal substitute for suicide. When the action moves out to Carter...
...Thus for Didion the beach, the desert, the freeways and the plastic extravagances of architecture were metaphors. For Director Perry they are just locations. Shorn of image, the story is a poor and predictable thing. Moreover, dialogue like "She has these very copious menstruations" and "That lemon is not artificial. That lemon is reconstituted" reads better than it sounds...
...Joan Didion wrote once in a shrewd essay, "the corruption and venality and restrictiveness of Hollywood have become...firm tenets of American social faith-and of Hollywood's own image of itself." Perry is a film maker who generally works far from Hollywood, but temperamentally and intellectually he is at the very center of the system Didion so deftly described...