Suffer the Children

If the mention of Michael Haneke and an "unproduced" Tennessee Williams screenplay set off alarms, our guest critic points you in the right direction.

Jimmy is the grandson of a former governor, but his family has fallen on hard times; his father (Will Patton) drinks himself into a daily stupor while his mother (Barbara Garrick) slips deeper into catatonia in a snake pit of a mental asylum. Jimmy does not reciprocate Fisher’s passion but is contemplating faking it for the sake of her money.

The two of them squabble on the way to a Halloween party hosted by Julie (Mamie Gummer), one of Fisher’s remaining friends, and it’s at the party that the plot comes to a boil — Fisher misplaces the titular bauble, half of a pair of her grandmother’s earrings said to be worth $10,000; Julie’s cousin Vinnie (Jessica Collins) immediately gets her claws into Jimmy; and Julie’s aunt Addie (Ellen Burstyn), a globe-trotting travel writer felled by a stroke, asks Fisher to give her enough pills to put her out of her misery.

Any or all of this might have been interesting in the right hands, but actress-turned-director Jodie Markell keeps the proceedings so sluggish and somniferous that I felt like I had swallowed a handful of Addie’s medication. Collins imbues Vinnie with some wonderfully naked rapaciousness that makes her the one character to stand out; everyone else on screen drowns in a glaze of honey.

Fisher’s the sort of character that audiences have to be able to judge and sympathize with simultaneously, and while Howard has shown herself to be a talented actress in other films, she feels adrift here. (One can only imagine what a lucid Lindsay Lohan — who was originally hired to play the role — might have done with the part.) Williams’ women are tricky roles to play, in that you have to skate out to the edge of Southern grandiosity without tipping over into the pit of drag queen self-parody; unfortunately, Howard, Ann-Margret and Burstyn all take the plunge.

And then there’s Chris Evans, a pretty actor who seems to have time-warped from the Henry Willson stable of hunky clients; back in the 1950s, they would have renamed him Chunk or Slab or something, alongside Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter. He may one day mature into a wizened-yet-hunky veteran actor of the James Brolin/Sam Elliott school, but for now he remains an attractive blank.

It’s tempting to recommend an eventual “Loss of a Teardrop Diamond” drinking game for when the film premieres on cable, but were you to take even a sip every time the words “teardrop diamond” are uttered, you’d pass out by the end. Which, after an hour or so of these Southern-fried shenanigans, might not be such a bad thing.

Alonso Duralde is our guest critic for the month of December.

“The White Ribbon” is now open in New York and Los Angeles; “The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond” is now open in limited release.

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