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As Southern Gothic goes, Simon Callow's
The Ballad of the Sad Café is about as eerie as a Great Depression-era tragedy can be, rife with subconscious rage, unholy alliances, androgyny, and grotesque spectacle. Based on a Carson McCullers novella but adapted from a stage version written by Edward Albee,
Ballad stars Vanessa Redgrave as Miss Amelia, a singular force in her dusty, rural town worthy of a Walker Percy photo spread. Owner of the only general store in sight, medicine woman, and manufacturer of moonshine strong enough to numb the day laborers who collapse on her porch, Miss Amelia controls the pulse of her community. Things change with the arrival of a strange, hunchbacked dwarf (Cork Hubbert) who claims to be her cousin, but who ultimately sides with Amelia's ex-husband (Keith Carradine) in a campaign to make her life a living hell. British character actor Callow's ambition behind the camera proves a little overwrought, but he delivers a powerfully atmospheric, even nightmarish, drama.
--Tom Keogh
An adaptation, directed by Simon Callow, of Carson McCullers's fable about unhappy love in a tiny Deep South mill town. The story describes a perfect circle of unrequited love among its three main characters: Miss Amelia Evans (Vanessa Redgrave), a tall, awkward woman who is the town's wealthiest resident and its most forbidding eccentric; her cousin Lymon (Cort Hubbert), a hunchbacked dwarf; and a mean cracker named Marvin Macy (Keith Carradine), who was once, briefly, Amelia's husband. Callow and the screenwriter, Michael Hirst, have adapted the story very faithfully, but they've missed its elusive, slyly comic voice. The narrative unfolds in a solemn, glum, stately manner-more like a Biblical parable than like a crazy backwoods folktale. The filmmakers seem to have been deceived by the apparent simplicity of McCullers's style-its fablelike directness and its bedtime-story intimacy of tone. They aim for a kind of mythic purity that's almost impossible to achieve in the movies. Despite the heroic efforts of Redgrave and Carradine, the characters in this picture don't seem quite human, and the stylized dialogue, much of it lifted outright from McCullers, doesn't have the poetic force that the filmmakers must have hoped it would have; everyone in the movie just sounds simpleminded. This picture is a brave undertaking, and it is clearly a labor of love, but it's doomed. Like all the strange loves of McCullers's story, it does not have a fortunate outcome: its object remains alone, untouched-impervious to the tenderest attentions. Also with Rod Steiger, Lanny Flaherty, and Earl Hindman. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
