Imploding the American Dream, Tennessee Williams creates a set of relationships disintegrating and going seriously wrong. A snobblish, cultured, stylish professional Blanche Du Bois (Gillian Anderson) joins her sister in the undesirable Elysian Fields, which are anything but dreamy and relaxing. Outstaying her welcome, she is trapped in a confined 2 room apartment with younger? older? sister, played by Vanessa Kirby, and her dominant husband in a narrow urban environment, this cruel drama plays out in explicit and violently explosive ways. No doors and one bathroom make it uncomfortable for everyone.
The husband's cruelty towards his wife is apparently worth it for the making up, even when she is pregnant; the husband turns more sadistic and twisted in his taunting and stalking of his wife's visting sister, who lives in fantastic dreams and faded glory and rarerified manners and nicety. The second half explodes her dreams for what they are - delusions and fantasies - but the truth revelation is cruel and brutal, rather than morally edifying or restorative. More could have been made of the husband who has to prove himself as a perhaps second generation Polish immigrant, as ex-army veteran; as a working class man experiencing the snobbery of two former Southern Belle plantation dwelling sisters whose wife revels in his 'commonness'. He doesn't seem to have any motivation for behaving in such a brutal way - he just is..and asserts himself over all in outbursts of violence and cruel mocking of those weaker than him.
Romance turns into cruelty; all the men are awful even the seemingly outwardly decent ones; marriages are shams and battlegrounds. The husband's attack on his wife's sister is weirdly portrayed - it is rape and yet here it's almost like the 'nice' sister is complicit in it, being part Sleeping Beauty and part corpse in a ridiculously over the top Prom dress and very stylised. And yet the result of all this is terrible - sister is set against sister; the husband gets his revenge in sending the visiting sister Blanche Du Bois to a mental institution at the end and being powerfully with his wailing wife and baby again. The exposed fantasies, delusions and lies leave everything rebuilt...on a lie. Bizarrely the unstable Blanche Du Bois has more quiet dignity in leaving than her wildly wailing sister.
Why does the husband want to wield power over the Du Bois sisters - is this the ultimate class revenge drama? Or is it a battle of the genders? The husband's pyshcology is never explored more deeply beyond him wanting to get what's due to his wife - economically or socially, from her sister. Unpleasant tho it and they all may be, Gillian Anderson gives an astonishing performance moving from fragility and alluringness to feisitiness and incredible physicality in abuse and suffering and self-annihilation. Also experiencing the worst birthday celebration ever under the husband's simmering explosions. Ironically the characters are all in a kind of lockdown confined in the tiny apartment without connecting doors and seemingly paper thin walls - truly a play for our times.
Watch while you can but be prepared for a bad taste to be left in your mouth at the end, and amazement at how Gillian Anderson did this show repeatedly...All the emotional and physical energy being poured out...
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