Word: marias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...Maria shares her empty despair with B.Z., her husband's producer, her homosexual friend who has grown weary of giving everyone favors. Ostensibly amused by L.A. playing itself, he is more alienated than Maria. His father visited Lourdes and lost his faith; B.Z. didn't bother with the trip. He sits at the bottom of the well which Maria is falling down. All he can do is smile and welcome a companion. They share the parties and friends, and make the right cynical jokes. And they both know that it adds up to zero...
...movie people are as unreal as their medium makes them. Carter makes his reputation by callously digging into Maria's past and releasing her photographed emotions as his first film. A talk-show panelist calls it "an existential performance." (It couldn't be Maria's life anymore.) But the manipulation goes deeper. A woman watching T.V. footage of her house sliding into the ocean comments on the good camerawork. Early in the movie while the camera pass the desert and finally settles on a God-forsaken huddle of buildings. Maria's voice-over tells us that she grew...
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...
Perry (David and Lisa, Diary of a Mad Housewife) resists their every effort, and eventually defeats them. The novel had Maria crushed by the anomie symbolized-perhaps too patly -by Southern California. The movie explains nothing. Perry is like a snorkle diver bobbing about in a bowl of angst. Content to float along watching the curious creatures beneath him, he never gets below the surface...