Nichols: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

The opening credits of Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Edward Albee’s Pulitzer-winning play are so stately and classical that they could easily be attributed to some great lost movie from the 40s, hovering at a polite distance behind a middle-aged couple, Martha and George, played by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, as they wander home across the bucolic liberal arts campus where George is an Associate Professor of History. The moment they – and the camera – step inside, however, we’re launched into an argument about who's best versed in 30s and 40s cinema, paving the way for a film that, perhaps more than any other big-budget top-billed Hollywood outing of the 1960s, sets out to establish itself as definitively post-classical, in terms of ambit, atmosphere and acting style. In large part, that’s because Albee's iconic vision of a marriage in crisis is so incompatible with even the residual confines of the Hays Code era that it more or less plays as a dismantling of every classical scruple and sentiment, lurching us into a strange new world that starts at the end of a boozy, combative evening and simply escalates from there, as Martha and George invite a couple they’ve met over the course of the night – Nick (George Segal) and Honey (Sandy Dennis) – back to their house for a tortuous session of “get the guests." Arguments, especially drunken arguments, tend to date pretty quickly – let alone in a film in which the characters are drunk for the entire duration – so it’s extraordinary how harsh, biting and volatile this still feels, as the repartee flows quickly, pre-emptively and cacaphonously as in the most daring screwball comedies, and voices already worn out from drinking and arguing all night are taken to ever greater levels of agony and aggression. If anything, it makes latter-day descendents, such as Roman Polanski’s Carnage, seem somewhat tame by comparison, thanks in part to Haskall Wexler’s incredible camera, which always feels a little too close to the actors – and gets closer as the night wears on – but is too mobile and shifting to ever settle into anything like a regular close-up either. Inhabiting it is like being trapped in a car with a drunk driver, vertiginously claustrophobic without being in the least stagy – a considerable achievement for a theatrical adaptation – as Martha and George's spray of abuse reaches such plosive, rapid-fire intensities that it's pretty much impossible for Wexler to cross-edit each new invective, instead forcing him to duck and weave around them like he’s shooting a boxing film, marriage as a spectator sport. For that reason, his camera works most organically when it’s trained on Taylor, who puts in the performance of a lifetime, perpetually speaking through a mouthful of food, ice or gin, and coughing, spluttering and contorting her delivery as if she's determined to twist further out of her beauty with each passing moment. Cloaked in accumulating, aggressive feedback, her luminous rage strives for the apex that will finally allow it to mutate into despair, even as the dawn only seems to get further and further away, sinking the film into the weird ambience of the wee small hours that both Nichols and Wexler do so well, the ebb and flow of late-night drunkenness, sudden lurches between existential introspection and expansive aggression. After the first ten minutes, you feel that it must be ending, that it can’t possibly intensify for another two hours – and yet it does, somehow it does, taking us into the very bosom of a marriage that, by all sane accounts, should have ended some twenty years before.