PROVIDENCE Movie Review
A dying writer (John Gielgud) spends a sleepless night in nearly intolerable pain, which he tries to fight off with bottle after bottle of cold white wine. As the night wears on, his imagination weaves his terror, his memories, and his desires into a fantastic, hallucinatory novel in which the members of his family act out a mysterious melodrama—though his story's progress occasionally halts for unwanted intrusions such as a recurring vision of his own impending autopsy. An English-language film written by playwright David Mercer and directed by France's Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad), Providence’s cast includes—in addition to Gielgud—Ellen Burstyn, Dirk Bogarde, David Warner, and Elaine Stritch. Their performances all seem disconcertingly stiff and bizarrely theatrical at first, but soon it's clear that the decidedly “unrealistic” manner of speech and the correspondingly expressionistic sets are exactly right for the unfinished, continually revised rough draft that Gielgud desperately rattles off as both dawn and the final deadline for making sense of his life close in. To say that everything comes together in the end would be quite an understatement—Providence has the kind of knockout finish that can make you see the world differently when you leave the theatre—yet the film is still seen and discussed only rarely. (The lilting themes of Miklos Rozsa's spellbinding score may actually be better known than the film itself.) Ten years after its quiet American release, Providence was screened as a sidebar event at the Telluride Film Festival; in a passionate and memorable 20-minute introduction to that screening, Norman Mailer called it simply the greatest film ever made about the creative process. On this single occasion at least, Mr. Mailer's opinion may very well be unassailable.
NEXT STOP … 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould, Last Year at Marienbad, Rashomon
1977 (R) 104m/C GB John Gielgud, Dirk Bogarde, Ellen Burstyn, David Warner, Elaine Stritch; D: Alain Resnais; W: David Mercer; C: Ricardo Aronovich; M: Miklos Rozsa. Cesar Awards ‘78: Best Art Direction/Set Decoration, Best Director (Resnais), Best Film, Best Sound, Best Writing, Best Score; New York Film Critics Awards ‘77: Best Actor (Gielgud). VHS COL