There are three major problems here, and not just for millennial-era viewers: 1) Jose Quintero's emotionally numb direction, 2) Warren Beatty in a role he wasn't cut out for until ten years later, and 3) Tennessee Williams's severely dated high concept.
Quintero's lack of experience in film is evident. He was a stage director, and it shows here. The lines are spoken for the words to be understood from a distance. Quintero seems to have little sense of using the faces of the actors to convey anything in the one- or two-shots... save for what the estimable Ms. Leigh manages on her own.
Beatty's Paolo needed at least some of Richard Gere's Julian (in "American Gigolo") to make this fly, but either he had no sense of the character himself or Quintero got in his way.
William's book is a reflection of Williams himself as the title character. "TRSOMS" is Williams trying to work through the fear of his own histrionic narcissism too many years in advance of what he pictured aging to be for a "queen" rather than what it really is. He was only 38 when he wrote the novella, after all. Leigh's character is him, but only insofar as he could project a future that he had merely envisioned rather than actually experienced.
I've read plenty about Ms. Leigh's own struggles and supposed identification with her character. But if that is the case, I don't see much of it on screen, again, perhaps, owing to the wooden direction.
Younger viewers will have to interpret this as a "period piece." 1950 and 1960 are to them what the Victorian Age was to us: Anachronistic. The conflicting values expressed by the characters do not make much sense to those raised on either Lady Gaga or "Cougartown." Today's 48-year-olds "go for it" on the basis of peer-approval, not despite it.
Quintero's lack of experience in film is evident. He was a stage director, and it shows here. The lines are spoken for the words to be understood from a distance. Quintero seems to have little sense of using the faces of the actors to convey anything in the one- or two-shots... save for what the estimable Ms. Leigh manages on her own.
Beatty's Paolo needed at least some of Richard Gere's Julian (in "American Gigolo") to make this fly, but either he had no sense of the character himself or Quintero got in his way.
William's book is a reflection of Williams himself as the title character. "TRSOMS" is Williams trying to work through the fear of his own histrionic narcissism too many years in advance of what he pictured aging to be for a "queen" rather than what it really is. He was only 38 when he wrote the novella, after all. Leigh's character is him, but only insofar as he could project a future that he had merely envisioned rather than actually experienced.
I've read plenty about Ms. Leigh's own struggles and supposed identification with her character. But if that is the case, I don't see much of it on screen, again, perhaps, owing to the wooden direction.
Younger viewers will have to interpret this as a "period piece." 1950 and 1960 are to them what the Victorian Age was to us: Anachronistic. The conflicting values expressed by the characters do not make much sense to those raised on either Lady Gaga or "Cougartown." Today's 48-year-olds "go for it" on the basis of peer-approval, not despite it.