Warner Archive Collection

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Blu-ray Review

Funny Games

Reviewed by Michael Reuben, April 26, 2016

There are many reasons why Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a landmark film. It was the first feature directed by Mike Nichols, inaugurating a career that would encompass The Graduate The Birdcage and Carnal Knowledge . It was the first film to have its entire credited cast nominated for Oscars and the second in history to be nominated in every category for which it was eligible (thirteen in all, with five wins). It ushered in a new era of frankness in Hollywood's treatment of mature subject matter, dealing a death blow to the Production Code (often called "the Hays Code") that had governed America's screens since 1930. It was the first film to carry an explicit warning that no one under 18 would be admitted without an accompanying adult.Statistics aside, though, Virginia Woolf remains a vital work today, fifty years after its initial release, because an unlikely group of collaborators successfully translated Edward Albee's original play to the screen with the same furious intensity that first electrified audiences in 1962. Albee's play continues to be revived, restaged and reinterpreted (twice on Broadway in the last twelve years), but Nichols' film has become an essential part of the drama's lore. No other classic of the American stage has received a more effective translation to the screen.For Virginia Woolf's fiftieth anniversary, the Warner Archive Collection has rescanned and restored the film for Blu-ray and accompanied it with the wealth of extras assembled for the 2006 DVD special edition.At the most basic level, Virginia Woolf is a portrait of two marriagesor perhaps it would be more accurate to call it an excavation. The action plays out over one late Saturday night and early Sunday morning at an unnamed university in a fictional New England town. (The production used Smith College for exteriors.) A couple in their fifties, George and Martha (Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor), walk home across the campus after a faculty party. Martha, the more aggressive drinker of the pair, is staggering.The opening scenes provide a first look at the couple's complex marriage. George is an Associate Professor of History (and only an Associate Professor, as his wife repeatedly reminds him), while Martha is the daughter of the university's president. She married George when he appeared to be a rising star in academia. Life has disappointed them both, but they are partners in disenchantment, filling their days and nights with barbs, banter and, yes, affection. Martha will later confide to a near-stranger that George is the only man she has ever loved. George, who initially appears to be beaten down by his wife's brassy extroversion, will gradually reveal hidden reserves of wily aggression. The fact that the couple bears the same names as America's founding President and First Lady is an intentional irony.On this night, though, the delicate balance (to borrow another Albee title) that keeps the marriage of George and Martha poised on the edge of mutual tolerance is upset by the arrival of another couple, Nick and Honey (George Segal and Sandy Dennis). He is a new addition to the faculty, a member of the Biology Department, although Martha mistakenly thinks he's in math and, as George immediately suspects, she doesn't particularly care what subject he teaches but only that he's young and handsome. Honey is his dutiful wife who, from the moment they appear onscreen, seems mismatched with this former quarterback and current golden boy of the sciences. Despite the late hour, Martha has invited the couple to join her and George for drinks, and Nick and Honey obey because Martha is, after all, the president's daughter.With Honey and Nick as her audience, and fueled by continuous drinking, Martha rapidly exceeds the customary boundaries of the loaded repartee with which she and George pass their hours. She pushes him too hard, says too much and lurches into prohibited topics like the couple's absent son. As George rises to the provocation, the evening turns violent: not so much physical violence (although that, too, occurs, improbably cheered on by an intoxicated Honey) but an emotional blitzkrieg waged by two highly articulate individuals who know each other's weak spots intimately. Nick and Honey are initially uncomfortable and bewildered by the maelstrom into which they have blundered, but they are helpless to resist, becoming pawns in the high-stakes match between their hosts. With the practiced eye of experienced combatants, Martha and George (particularly George) sniff out the younger couple's weaknesses and hammer on the fractures in their marriage. Secrets are revealed, lies exposed, and at some point in the evening, each partner betrays the other. Like the original play, the film leaves the viewer to decide how (or whether) each couple will find their way forward after their parting at dawn.The script of Virginia Woolf is officially credited to Ernest Lehman ( Sweet Smell of Success ), who, as Albee later commented, wrote "about twenty-five words". Indeed, Nichols rejected Lehman's script, which changed the ending, and returned to Albee's original text. With trims for running time and a few substituted words to satisfy the concerns of the MPAA, Virginia Woolf is heard in the film just as Albee wrote it. Freed from the stage's spatial constraints, Nichols' camera roams throughout George's and Martha's housethe play is confined to their living roomventures into the front and back yard and, in a controversial decision, follows the foursome to a roadside bar for dancing, more drinks and several of the night's most brutal confrontations. Nichols and cinematographer Haskell Wexler use deep focus, odd angles and carefully selected closeups to pull viewers into the fray and give the escalating conflicts a visceral immediacy. (Albee, who generally approved of the film, complained that it lost the "intellectual" level of his text, but it's there if you look for it.)The casting of Taylor and Burton raised eyebrows at the time (including Albee's), not only due to the stars' own tempestuous marriage, but also because Taylor, at 32, was twenty years younger than her character. Under Nichols' direction, however, both actors deliver career-best performances. Burton speaks George's literate dialogue with naturalistic ease, free of the thespian mannerisms on which he would fall back later in his career, as his own drinking sapped his gifts. Taylor's Martha was (and remains) a revelation. Gaining thirty pounds, aging herself with hair and makeup, and shedding every trace of the glamorous movie star who dominated the era's gossip columns, the actress conveys Martha's anger, her cruelty and her desperate need for love with an emotional transparency that is both terrifying and painful. When George accuses her of being a monster, Martha famously replies: "I'm loud and I'm vulgar, and I wear the pants in the house because somebody's got to, but I am not a monster. I'm not!"and Taylor's delivery is so fraught that she conveys both Martha's furious denial and her frightened suspicion that a monster is exactly what she's become. (Nichols has said that, no matter how good Taylor's performance seemed on the set, when he saw it on film, it was ten times better.)