Philadelphia Film Festival 2009

Out of the Tennessee Williams’ trunk tumbles this story originally conceived for the screen by Williams but never developed. Actress-turned-director Jodie Markell (Big Love) brings it to life for all the Tennessee Williams fans to sift and savor in light of his larger, grander, more masterful works that transformed American drama. There’s the loneliness and yearning in the deep south of the 1920s, the social rituals of landed folk, and the itchy energy of a restless woman groping her way out of the petticoat world of Antebellum Southern ladies toward the Jazz Age and something like modernity. Bryce Dallas Howard plays Fisher Willow, a young deb who’s just home from the Sorbonne and uncomfortable enough in her skin and station to put everyone still living in a plantation world on edge. Without an escort to the cotillion, she hires Jimmy Dobyne (Chris Evans), who works on her father’s plantation, to tux up and attend her. But then one of Fisher’s teardrop diamond earrings goes missing… Ellen Burstyn and Ann Margret round out the portrait Wiliams meant to paint here, and Markell gives us a rare chance to gaze back in time again through Williams’ eyes.—Harlan Jacobson