Geraldine Page, Interiors

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

David Denby

“…. [T]he movie is about a large family's agonized relations with the family matriarch, Eve (Geraldine Page), a kind of earth mother in reverse--she draws life and energy out of her husband and children, leaving them half paralyzed with guilt.

“An accomplished and beautiful woman, Eve dominates her family with hysterical good taste, imposing her style on everyone's home, so that none of her offspring can escape her. Since her imperiousness is accompanied by unending self-pity and a readiness to find betrayal in the slightest holding back of affection, her children can neither live up to her standards nor simply offer their love without losing their self-respect. When this piteous Queen Lear is finally abandoned by her husband (E. G. Marshall), she falls apart, drifting toward madness and death…

“…. Woody Allen pushes for the maximum intensity out of his actresses. I had trouble accepting Diane Keaton's stiff-backed irritability as a poet's despair, but Geraldine Page, on the other hand, is a revelation. So mannered and tricky years ago in her much praised movie performances in Summer and Smoke and Sweet Bird of Youth, she's a plainer actress now; as the psychotic Eve she unnerves us by letting her face crumple and her unmoored voice drift off into a querulous whine. Heavy and jowly, swathed in flowing gray robes, she is the Manhattan matron in extremis, both pitiful and terrifying. Matching her in intensity in the thankless role of Joey, Marybeth Hurt clenches her teeth and sets her jaw tight, her face hardened against the rejection Joey expects. Since her expression is nearly immobile, the performance moves us strictly through vocal nuance….

David Denby
New York, August 14, 1978

Stephen Schiff

“…. Its central figure is the family matriarch, Eve (Geraldine Page), a regal, domineering interior decorator who has imposed her obsessive good taste on her husband and three grown daughters until it's smothered the life and love out of them. Compulsive, manipulative and paranoid … Eve is not an endearing character, but her emotional frailty makes her genuinely pitiable. When her long-suffering husband (E.G. Marshall) finally leaves her…, Eve comes unglued, and her descent into madness and self-annihilation is truly unnerving….

“Still, some of the performances are engrossing. Marybeth Hurt's still, taut Joey has the clear, timid eyes and clenched jaw of someone who expects pain, a prisoner awaiting the whip. And Geraldine Page makes a magnificent Eve. A heavy, redoubtable woman in immaculate gray suits, she's an ice queen fending off terror and madness. As she struggles with her demons, her face collapses, her forehead wars with her eyes and she pulls her mouth into a knot, as if to keep the agony from spilling out. Page has often been crafty to the point of manipulation; here, we never catch her "acting," and her lived-in anguish is very moving indeed. Unfortunately, Diane Keaton's haggard performance, for all the courage in its plainness, is a disaster….”

“… [Pearl's] galvanizing entrance could have sabotaged Interiors. Even if we'd previously been inclined to take this dour family seriously, how can we once Pearl's vivacity has punctured gloom? She reveals Keaton, Griffith, Hurt and even Page for the spoiled children they are, and their spiritual poverty suddenly seems, well, laughable.

“Perhaps what's most remarkable about Interiors is that this sudden shift in perspective saves the film instead of ruining it….”

Stephen Schiff
Boston Phoenix, 1978

[left out some on both above?]

Stephen Farber

“…. The satiric edge of his comedies is implicit in the complex, hard-edged portraiture of a group of gifted, maddening, self-indulgent people.

“To take just one example, the family matriarch, Eve (Geraldine Page), is a high-strung aesthete who's ordered her family's lives for as long as they can remember. Her reverence for art takes the form of fanatical attention to details of interior decoration…. It's impossible not to laugh at her compulsive attention to detail, and in his earlier films, Allen would have mocked her more ruthlessly. This time he cuts deeper; he sympathetically points out the disorientation she feels when her husband leaves her and her orderly life begins to crumble. The portrait of Eve is a masterful balancing act, a blend of irony and compassion. Geraldine Page's searing performance keeps us in a tense, ambivalent relationship with the character throughout the movie.

“One startling moment epitomizes the tone of the film. When Eve attempts to commit suicide by turning on the gas oven, she first seals all the windows in her apartment with black masking tape. Unfortunately, the tape runs out just before she completes her grisly task, and she has to finish the job with a tiny roll of white adhesive tape. The scene itself recalls Liv Ullmann's suicide attempt in Face to Face, but the subtle, subversive, macabre joke about the white adhesive tape is a touch that Bergman never would have dreamed of including….”

Stephen Farber
New West, September 11, 1978

Pauline Kael

“…. The problem for the family in the film is the towering figure of the disciplined, manipulative, inner-directed mother (Geraldine Page). She is such a perfectionist that she cannot enjoy anything, and the standards of taste and achievement that she imposes on her three daughters tie them in such knots that they all consider themselves failures. Alvy Singer, the role Woody Allen played in Annie Hall, was just such a compulsive, judgmental spoilsport, and Allen's original title for that film was Anhedonia--the lack of the capacity for experiencing pleasure.

“…. The two mothers [Eve and Pearl] appear to be the two sides of the mythic dominating Jewish matriarch--the one dedicated to spiritual perfection, the other to sensual appetites, security, getting along in the world, cracking a few jokes. It's part of the solemn unease of the film that no one would want either of them for a mother: they're both bigger than life, and the first is a nightmare of sexual austerity, the second an embarrassment of yielding flesh and middle-class worldliness. If the two are warring for control of Woody Allen, the first (the real mother) clearly has him in the stronger grip. She represents the death of the instincts, but she also represents art, or at least cultivation and pseudo-art. (As a decorator, her specialty, like Woody Allen's here, seems to be the achievement of a suffocating emptiness.)….

“…. Geraldine Page is playing neurosis incarnate, and the camera is too close to her, especially when her muscles collapse: this failure of discretion makes her performance seem abhorrent. But Maureen Stapleton livens things up with her rather crudely written role. Hers is the only role that isn't strictly thematic, and you can feel the audience awake from its torpor when she arrives on the scene and talks like a conventional stage character….”

Pauline Kael
New Yorker, September 25, 1978
When the Lights Go Down, 437-9
[Kael was one of the few Keaton supporters for this movie.]

David Thomson

“She contributed a performance of exquisite enclosed self-pity to a movie that required exactly and only that, Interiors…”

David Thomson
A Biographical Dictionary of Film,
Second Edition, 1981, p 458

Vincent Canby

“The most vital and believable character in the entire film is Arthur’s intended, Pearl, a good-hearted, none-too-bright widow played with enormous humanity and humor by Maureen Stapleton….

“Two sequences with Miss Page are among the memorable things of this film season—the one in which the camera catches her confused reactions as her husband coolly announces his plans for a separation, and the other, which is virtually a subliminal shot, showing the actress in three-quarters profile, sitting in a darkened room, sipping white wine and watching a Christian revivalist on television. This is one way the world can end.”

Vincent Canby
The New York Times, August 6, 1978

“Maureen Stapleton is a fine actress, who fully deserves the attention she has received for her work in Woody Allen’s “Interiors,” yet how can one sanely support giving her an award for “Interiors” without recognizing Geraldine Page’s extraordinary performance in the same film?”

Canby
January 7, 1979, sec 2, p 13 & 19
(like above, from my note cards)

Stanley Kauffmann

“…. Much has been made of the fact that [Allen] has moved from a Jewish view of the world to a gentile one. I deplore this, too, because I sense the Arthur Miller syndrome: if you are a Jew and want to write on large tragic matters, you must use gentile characters in order to get universality. Allen's characters are not, like those in Death of a Salesman, feebly disguised Jews; but they are abstracts, conjectures, with nothing of the reality that, for instance, the gentile Annie Hall had when avowedly seen through Jewish eyes.

“All the actors are acceptable, and I ought to note that Page works with much less affectation than usual and Stapleton with many fewer clichés.”

Stanley Kauffmann
The New Republic, Sept. 9, 1978
Before My Eyes, p 147
[don't have whole review]

[Like Farber, Kauffmann liked the scene where Eve ran out of tape during her suicide attempt.]