Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Two-Disc Special Edition)
by Mike Nichols
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal, Richard Burton, Sandy DennisDirector: Mike Nichols
Brand: TAYLOR,ELIZABETH
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); Korean (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; Latin (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 131 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-12-05
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Model: 82109
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- Mike Nichols' first directorial effort represents a milestone in psychological realism and "foul" language in American cinema. George and Martha, as played superbly and without vanity by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, are as far from the bourgeois 1950s perfect married couple as you can get, alternatively badgering, berating, abusing and loving each other, both alone and accompanied by t
Movie Reviews of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Movie Review: "Stunt casting" in this boundary-breaking film works, and in fact helps create a masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
I was rather surprised on actually looking up the information to find out that I'd only seen, as far as I can be sure, 5 films starring Elizabeth Taylor and 4 starring her husband at the time this one was made, Richard Burton. That and not having a really clear impression of director Mike Nichols' work, nor having read the Edward Albee play on which the film is based or really knowing much about it besides the typical, often derisive comment that it's "2 hours of people screaming at each other", made me able to watch this film from a position of relative ignorance, which I think made some difference. What little I had seen with Taylor was mostly forgotten, and what I did remember wasn't so positive - she had struck me as a lightweight with a kind of breathless and vapid air about her; and Burton I remembered also from some of his lesser work and action movies that didn't take a lot of chops. So I was altogether unprepared...
A full moon, clouds moving over it, in sharp black and white. Dissolve to a pan from treetops down to a distant building, in the dark, in the fall with the leaves blowing, a college campus perhaps, a man and a woman slowly walking towards the camera, then passing behind a tree, another dissolve to an overhead shot, they look like dolls...George (Burton) an Associate Professor of History at an unnamed small college, and Martha (Taylor) his wife, both in their late 40s or so, walking home after an event. Entering their old two-story house, Martha exclaims, "What a dump" in an exaggerated tone and then proceeds to badger George to tell her what film it's from. They banter back and forth, getting progressively more testy; they go upstairs, lie on the bed, and Martha starts singing "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (to the tune of "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush") as they start acting more tenderly; it was all a game, perhaps?
Then Martha informs George that she's invited a younger couple over; they were at a faculty party it seems, and Martha had an eye on the young man (George Segal, his character never named) who with his young wife Honey (Sandy Dennis) shows up a few moments later, as both George and Martha are getting more liquored up - and more bitchy with each other. The young couple comes in, more drinks are poured, the fighting continues, the dialogue intensifies, then dies, then re-ignites, like a fugue, like the wonderful Alex North score which at all times reminds us of the tenderness lying underneath the hostility in a marriage that clearly did not turn out the way either party wanted it to - but is nonetheless the defining, central, impossible-to-give-up element in both lives. So it continues for two hours, as Martha seduces the young man; as both Martha and George try to outdo each other in ferocity and cruelty, as physical violence seems just around the corner, and a kiss and tears around the next. And always there is wit, and always there is the drama of wondering how, and if, the younger couple will seek to escape this dark path that lies as an example in front of them; and always there is more and more liquor.
There's never a dull moment, never even a merely OK moment in this spectacularly compelling, funny, and heartwrending piece of work. Haskell Wexler's laserlike sharp, high-contrast photography conveys the shadowy world of noir or crime drama, the underbelly of this tormented couple's lives, but also a fantastic never-never land - a swing out back, the roadhouse down the way, a strange beauty of nightly creation and destruction as George and Martha over and over approach and ultimately reject any kind of lasting understanding of each other, circling like the mobile camera that Nichols directs like a master on only his first film. North's score I've mentioned, which evokes Bach and Handel, the classical world of George's bookish life, gentle harp and guitar and other strings for the most part, a calmness in the midst of the crazy inner worlds in front of us.
But it is the actors who are the reason we're watching this, after all, and none of them disappoint. Sandy Dennis and George Segal, at the very beginnings of their careers, hold their own as the alternately frightened and excited young couple, he ambivalent about a marriage out of necessity and a wealthy father-in-law, she a secret heavy drinker and apparently full of sickness-inducing guilt, perhaps out of the marriage, perhaps out of other mysterious reasons. Taylor and Burton, though, are the reasons you're probably watching the film, and they both so far transcend what I knew of them or thought they could do that it was like watching them for the first time. Taylor was only 33 - at least 15 years too young - when shooting started, and put on 30 pounds, lowered her voice and seemed to have ripped all sweetness out of her manner - except for those rare moments when both Liz, and the Martha as she must have been, are allowed to emerge. She seems every bit the disillusioned romantic, a last vestige of the pre-feminist era who knows that there is more to life than her husband, but has never found it and doesn't even really know where to look. She's ferocious, catty, and always angling because she always knows that she's still got it. Her slight upper-crust accent seems to fade in and out in tune with the role she's playing at that moment - scorned wife, loving wife, angry and profane drunk, would-be-intellectual who can't keep up with her husband, snobby daughter of the college president - and much more. Burton is, if anything, even more impressive, though perhaps I'm giving him that mostly for having a slightly larger role, and for being in essence the tragic hero - the man who could never be the great scholar that he wanted to be, the political mover in the school that his wife and father-and-law expected, the lover that she wanted, the father...but that would spoil it.
Albee's best-known work beside the 1962 play on which this was based may be his slightly earlier absurdist "Zoo Story", which is on the surface closer to fantasy than VIRGINIA WOOLF; but this film (and I assume the play) skirts the borders of reality throughout it's length, with at least a couple of moments (stories, really) which are never particularly explained and left very much up to us to decipher or interpret. Is the "Bergin" story that he tells the young man and that gets repeated later, more drunkenly, more angrily, George's real memory of what a schoolmate went through? Is it George's own experience? Is it that of the son", apparently made up, that George and Martha could never have? Is it entirely something from his own imagination, but played out with Martha endlessly in different versions, to different couples and with variations on other games, on previous nights, year after year?
All good things, all good movies, all bad nights and fantastic nights and hard dark nights of the soul must come to the end, and so does VIRGINIA WOOLF die with a whimper, softly, gently, tenderly....desperately.
DVD FEATURES/QUALITY - the transfer on this issue is excellent, soundwise and especially picturewise, beautifully sharp and deep. Two commentary tracks; I've only listened to about half of the track with director Nichols and accolyte Steven Soderbergh but it's very good; the other features cinematographer Wexler. Both featurettes on the making of/impact of the film on the second disc are solid; the Taylor TV bio isn't anything special but isn't bad. Absolutely one of my favorite DVDs.
Summary of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Two couples get together for an evening cocktail party that turns abusive and bitter.Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: NR
Release Date: 5-DEC-2006
Media Type: DVD
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