In “The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond,” Bryce Dallas Howard ignites like a firecracker, playing an impulsive, emotionally unstable heiress recklessly defying the hidebound conventions of 1920s Memphis high society. This Southern period piece, the first feature directed by Jodie Markell, exhumes an obscure Tennessee Williams screenplay, written in 1957, in which Williams returned to realism following the crushing reception of his symbol-weighted stage drama “Orpheus Descending.”
Ms. Howard’s character, Fisher Willow, has the familiar hallmarks of a wounded Williams angel but lacks the tragic dimension of his greatest creation, Blanche DuBois. Within the Williams canon, the screenplay qualifies as middle-drawer. With its strained, quasi-poetic language that fitfully tries to soar, “The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond” is a significant, though less than monumental feat of reclamation.
Headstrong and flighty with a hint of madness, Fisher is too rebellious a creature to nestle comfortably into any social niche. Having studied at the Sorbonne, dabbled in painting, and flitted through European bohemian salons, she is a conspicuously cosmopolitan presence in a provincial Southern society that Williams views with a scathing contempt. Here the closest thing to art is a prim “end of summer” pageant performed by preadolescent girls and attended by Fisher’s stern maiden aunt, Cornelia (a seriously miscast and wooden Ann-Margret).
Riches notwithstanding, the Willow family name has been tarnished by the drowning of several tenant farmers in a flood caused by Fisher’s father’s demolition of a levee. Fisher is squirming under the thumb of Cornelia, who controls the purse strings and has warned her that if she doesn’t marry respectably and settle down, the millions she stands to inherit will be left to the church.
Fisher’s efforts to buckle down are half-hearted at best. To squire her to social functions, she hires as an escort Jimmy Dobyne (Chris Evans), the impoverished son of the drunk (Will Patton) who runs the commissary on her father’s plantation. At their first fancy social outing, for which she supplies Jimmy’s formal wear, she blithely introduces him as the grandson of a former Tennessee governor.
Jimmy isn’t a character so much as a moral ideal held up to reflect the creeping rot of the world around him. Courtly and humble, handsome but without a trace of vanity, and unfailingly honest, he cares for his drunken father and regularly visits his silent, spectral mother in a mental hospital. It is no wonder that Fisher falls in love with this impossibly perfect abstraction and tries to change their relationship from a business arrangement into a romantic one. “You could get used to me,” she pleads in vain.
The heart of the story takes place at a Halloween party at which Fisher loses, in the hostess’s driveway, a $5,000 earring lent to her by Cornelia. The imperious and distracted Fisher is too self-involved to offer much support when Jimmy imagines she has accused him of theft. And when a treacherous former date of Jimmy’s pounces on him, Fisher retreats into a sulk.
Upstairs at the party, Fisher visits a kindred free spirit, Miss Addie (a wonderful Ellen Burstyn), now a miserably pain-wracked woman immobilized by a stroke, who entreats Fisher to give her “deliverance” through an overdose of pain medication. In her youth, Addie had fled to China, where she remained for years and became addicted to opium. In a phantasmagoric scene, Fisher takes some of Addie’s opiates and experiences much of the rest of the party as an eerie waking dream.
The guests are a toxic microcosm of molasses-coated pettiness in which the conniving young women conspire against Fisher and the frat boys’ gentlemanly airs barely conceal their underlying brutishness.
As in so many of Williams’s plays, Fisher and Addie are the poignant manifestations of the restless dreamers and poets with whom he passionately identified: wayward moths fluttering unsteadily toward a light glimpsed through the windows of the prisons in which they find themselves alone and misunderstood.
“The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has sexual situations.
THE LOSS OF A TEARDROP DIAMOND
Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.
Directed by Jodie Markell; written by Tennessee Williams; director of photography, Giles Nuttgens; edited by Susan E. Morse; music by Mark Orton; production designer, Richard Hoover; produced by Brad Michael Gilbert; released by Paladin. At the Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes.
WITH: Bryce Dallas Howard (Fisher Willow), Chris Evans (Jimmy Dobyne), Ellen Burstyn (Miss Addie), Mamie Gummer (Julie), Ann-Margret (Cornelia), Will Patton (Old Man Dobyne) and Jessica Collins (Vinnie).