The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (2008)

LOSS OF A TEARDROP DIAMOND is a film that tries hard to be significant and important and barely keeps the viewer seated until it is over. The 'screenplay' is credited to Tennessee Williams (who has been dead since 1983), having been written in 1957, a year after 'Baby Doll', and while the screenplay may have been completed by Williams, it has obviously been 'touched up' by someone else: Williams more than likely never planned to have the work on celluloid. The cast is adequate, given the material, and the direction (Jodie Markell) is pretty shoddy. It probably would have been best to leave this 'screenplay' by one of America's greatest playwrights on the shelf.

Fisher Willlow (Bryce Dallas Howard) is from wealth in Tennessee, but her family is disliked because of a levee built by the father that ruined the hopes of farmers in the area. She is a shallow, resented, needy, attention hungry woman, unmarried and past her Southern prime, having spent her 'debut years' abroad studying in Paris (and being hospitalized in Zurich for mental illness). She returns home, fancies the hunky Jimmy Dobyne (Chris Evans) who is the grandson of the ex-mayor of the town, but who spends his time caring for this alcoholic failure of a father (Will Patton) and his institutionalized mentally ill mother (Barbara Garrick). Not having viable social connections, Fisher invites Jimmy to be her social escort, buys him tuxedos and clothes to make him look like a wealthy suitor, borrows the family teardrop diamond earrings from Cornelia (Ann-Margaret), and is off to a Halloween party hosted by Julie (Mamie Gummer). On the way into the party Fisher loses one of the teardrop diamonds, and flies into a panic. She is summoned upstairs by the mother of Julie - Addie (Ellen Burstyn) - who has had multiple strokes and longs to die. Knowing that Fisher is a headstrong woman, Addie convinces Fisher to 'assist' her death by handing her what amounts to be an overdose of pills. Meanwhile, downstairs, Jimmy has taken up with a guest of Julie's - Vinnie (Jessica Collins), who has a history of being a salesclerk in a drugstore thus making her not of the same echelon as the others at the party. Apparently Jimmy and Vinnie had been friends before and passion enters seemingly binding the two social misfits. But reality steps in when Fisher discovers the developments and the social rules win out. The ending is too sanguine to mention.

The elements that were the recipe for Tennessee William's highly successful plays and films are repeated here, but now we have no character with whom we can empathize: everyone is a plagiarized caricature of Williams' popular tropes. A shame.

Grady Harp