A rough but fascinating movie

What was the illness that plagued poet T.S. Elliots’ wife to such a degree? I knew nothing about this story going in, nor did I believe it would fascinate me, but that’s the surprise of Brian Gilbert’s “Tom and Viv”. This is not just a love story (in fact I might even hesitate to call it one at all) but a complex and tragic tale of the unknown, and how people responded to it.

Willem Dafoe plays Elliot, an American scholar at Oxford who somehow met Vivienne Haigh-Wood (Miranda Richardson) and started a wild fling with her resulted in a fast engagement. What drew the two together in the first place is a topic of great interest. He is about as buttoned up as a person can be; the guy basically decided that he wanted to be British after all, but that was not who Viv was. A woman of manic energy and free-spiritedness, she immediately seems a picture of instability though it’s hard to tell if insanity is her problem.

She does have a medical problem that can cause wild mood swings but she also had a lot of menstrual struggles which were connected, but which seemed to baffled doctors into giving her several misdiagnoses. Her aristocratic family is not too pleased she married a writer with no real prospects but her mother (Rosemary Harris) does like the fact that Tom is a man of discretion who can deal with Viv’s many inappropriate outbursts, such as shouting the people who want to fuck her at a fancy dinner.

Viv doesn’t think much of her family, or high society, which seems to be why she responded to Tom as well as she did. And for Tom, apparently she was his muse, though the film isn’t very good at explaining just how important she was to that endeavor. Instead it’s a film of relationship turmoil, as Tom accepts a job as a banker in order to support them both- a move that Viv sees as a rejection of her anti-aristocratic values. Her condition continues to worsen and Tom’s feelings for her seem to turn to pity and quiet desperation rather than love.

There is also some question of the trust her recently deceased father sets up, which suddenly names Tom as the main trustee due to her increasing erratic behavior. That might convey some seriously insidious motivations on his part but the film is way more psychologically fascinating than that- exposing how families during this time both tried to love but also hide the shame of their relative’s with mental diseases. The last third, which chronicles this family’s process of turning on her as a form of love (and the absurd tests to verify competency), encompass some of the film’s most effective moments.

Richardson’s performance is brilliant and heartbreaking, playing a woman very aware of the burden she’s becoming and the fact that many are treating her as an invalid for her own good. Dafoe makes Elliot even more of an enigma than the wife- impassive and seemingly exhausted by the entire relationship, his motivations become all the more intriguing as the film goes on. And Harris is another stand-out, lovingly trying to protect her daughter in every way she can.

In the end, this movie doesn’t offer up easy answers and it doesn’t shy away from tragedy but what it does do very well is show the sordidness of this illness and how it’s dealt with, and how many of these characters are easy to see as either victims or at fault in this situation in equal measure. You won’t feel like you know them any better in the end, but you can at least appreciate how the film portrays the great difficulty of the situation they found themselves in.