Ash Wednesday
(1973)
Director: Larry Peerce
Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Helmut Berger, Henry Fonda
We live in a
world where there is a lot of variety. Many different races, religions,
languages, and a lot more that makes each of us very different from the
person next to us or in a different country. But while each of us has
many different attributes that make us all different, for the most part
we share some of the same basic desires. Some of these are pretty
obvious, like the need for food, water, and shelter. But another desire
that you'll find in people is the desire to belong, to be accepted by
the people around us. This need for wanting to be accepted by your
peers comes in many different ways, and has gotten people to commit
countless certain acts in order that the results would have them be
accepted. For example, take the fact of many people needing corrective
lenses for their eyes - I've heard that about half the population of
the world finds they need corrective lenses sometime in their
lifetimes. Despite the fact that so many people need corrective lenses,
and some of them being very famous people (I once read that every
president of the United States has needed corrective lenses for their
eyes), there is still a strong feeling among many people that having
glasses makes you appear to be less of a person. This has resulted in
people coming up with ways to get around needing glasses. There was the
perfection of contact lenses in the late 19th century. More than a
hundred years later, there came the invention of laser eye surgery,
which with a few zaps can make you appear to be one of the individuals
who has been blessed with lifetime 20/20 vision.
I am one of the half of the world's population that
needed corrective lenses. When I was younger, I wore contact lenses in
an attempt to fit in. But after several years of sore eyes, I finally
said screw it, it's not worth it. And I would never consider laser eye
surgery, after reading several stories of people who went through the
process and found that their vision was actually damaged. You might
think that I don't really care how I come across in public, and to some
degree that's true. But now that I am approaching middle-age, I am
starting to find that part of me is trying to fit in society in a
certain way. Recently, one morning when I was looking into the mirror
in my bathroom, I was shocked to find that I had a few grey hairs on
the side of my head. Fortunately, after a trip to the barber for a
much-needed haircut, those grey hairs were all but invisible to the
eye. So with regular haircuts for a few more years, I will still be
able to pass myself off as being a fairly young individual. Yes, I am
still obsessed with being a part of the youth culture. As you probably
know, whether you are a truly young person or not, youth in many ways
rule just about any society that's in this world. This includes when it
comes to motion pictures. Youth didn't always rule the motion picture
industry. Think about movies that were made in the 1930s and 1940s, for
example. When you saw someone in a movie from that era who was in their
20s, they always seemed to be played by actors who looked much older
than that. Being an adult was clearly more admired than being a youth
back then.
The real youths decades ago were certainly frustrated at times by that.
Producer Samuel Z. Arkoff once recalled seeing a very adult Elizabeth
Taylor playing a teenager in a movie, and a youth in the audience
yelled, "She's old enough to be my mother!" But for many people, Taylor
could get away with a role
like that. She was not only talented enough
to win two Academy Awards in her career, she was undeniably a beautiful
woman. I am sure that she chose some of the roles in her career that
complimented her beauty - that would be a real ego boost. So I can see
why she probably jumped at the opportunity to star in Ash Wednesday.
It not only dealt with portraying her as coming across as young and
beautiful, but it dealt with the idea of plastic surgery - something I
am sure many of us aging moviegoers have mulled about since youthful
looks seem to be key to happiness in this beauty and youth-oriented
society of ours. In Ash Wednesday,
Taylor plays Barbara Sawyer, a woman from Detroit who may be
middle-aged, but thanks to the makeup department looks a lot older than
she really is. At the beginning of the movie, she is being prepared to
go under the plastic surgeon's knife in an exclusive Europe clinic. The
reason she is going through the procedure is unexplained at first, but
it is slowly revealed that she is estranged from her husband Mark
(Fonda, The Great Smokey
Roadblock),
and hopes that her rejuvenated looks will jump-start her marriage.
After getting the surgery, and now looking like the beautiful Elizabeth
Taylor we all know and love, she travels to the Italian resort of
Cortina where she spends most of the remaining running time waiting for
Mark to arrive. While she waits, she makes friends with a famous
fashion photographer (played by Keith Baxter), reunites with her adult
daughter (Margaret Blye, In The Heat
Of The Night), and contemplates having an affair with a younger
man despite wanting to save her marriage.
Elizabeth Taylor was forty-one years old when she made Ash Wednesday,
an age when actresses in Hollywood start to find it difficult to be
cast in major Hollywood studio movies. So no doubt Taylor was starting
to feel the pressure of appearing at her very best, both in looks and
with her acting ability. One might wonder before watching this movie if
Taylor was able to perform at her best with these pressures, as well as
wonder if Taylor was able to appear as the beautiful woman the other
characters in the movie feel her character is. After watching the
movie, I can tell you with full confidence that whatever faults the
movie might have, none of them have to do with Taylor. Taylor at this
stage still looked as beautiful as ever, so you can believe incidents
like when a much younger man at the resort is attracted to her enough
to want to sleep with her. But Taylor doesn't let her looks do all of
her character's talking - she does some serious acting as well. Taylor
gives her role a number of subtle touches that make this character a
real person and not a caricature. In one scene, she is telephoning her
husband while her back is pointed to the camera. Her husband does not
pick up at his end, and Taylor lowers her posture ever so slightly in
reaction to being ignored by the one she loves. Her body language tells
us of her hurt feelings. Later in the movie, there is a scene where
Taylor, with her new face, sees her reflection in a pane of glass. She
does not smile, but the expression on her eyes, and the playing with
her necklace with her fingers shows that her character is still amazed
by herself weeks after her surgery, and that she loves
her new looks. Aspiring actors might want to watch this movie to see
some examples of what they can do on stage when their characters have
no dialogue.
When Taylor does have to deliver some dialogue, she manages to find the
right tone to speak it. Another actress in the role might have felt
that playing a now-beautiful woman would require being extremely proud
and expressive, which I don't think would have been right. Taylor shows
in her words that her character is happy, but one that still has some
fears about her marriage and what might happen when she finally meets
her husband. These doubts make her a more sympathetic and interesting
person than someone who would be more brash and proud. I feel I should
also point out that Taylor is not the only actor in Ash Wednesday
who gives a good performance. Keith Baxter gives a sparkling
performance as the fashion photographer who befriends Taylor. His
playful acting gives his character intelligence, as well as giving a
welcome sense of humor to an otherwise serious movie. Margaret Blye
also does well in her somewhat small role as Taylor's visiting
daughter. The role requires her to be someone who loves her mother, but
someone who also has her own life now that she's an adult, and one who
doesn't hold back the truth about the status of her mother's marriage.
Blye's seriousness is the right note for this character. As for the
other actors in the movie, I did have a couple of problems with them.
It's not the fault of actor Helmut Berger (The Godfather: Part III),
who plays the young man attracted to Taylor at the resort, that he's
given so little to work with the screenplay; I don't think his
character's name is even mentioned once in the movie, for one thing.
And as for Henry Fonda, he only appears in the movie's last ten
minutes, and the fact that his role is so small might explain why Fonda
doesn't seem very interested in his surroundings or giving anything
more than a pretty bland and unemotional performance.
I have several other complaints about the movie, complaints that I
could spend some time discussing. There is the part of the movie where
the plastic surgery is performed. Not only is it unnecessary of the
movie to show us the surgery, the movie uses footage of real plastic
surgery, which is somewhat gross to witness. (This footage may explain
why the movie got an "R" rating at the time, despite the rest of the
movie being barely PG-grade.) There is also the fact that the
characters Baxter and Berger play eventually disappear and are pretty
much forgotten about by the time the end credits start rolling. Maybe I
could look over such flaws like those had the biggest problem I had
with the movie wasn't there - and it's a BIG problem. What is the
problem? Well, the biggest problem the movie has is that between the
opening plastic surgery and Taylor meeting with her husband in the last
ten minutes, pretty much nothing
of consequence happens. When Taylor gets to the resort, for example,
the movie shows her walking alone... then having dinner alone... then
drinking a hot drink... then taking another walk... then going on a ski
gondola... then sees people with other people... then eating a
pastry... then calling her daughter... then going out to dinner....
then... must I go on? Most of Ash Wednesday
is filled with scenes like those, scenes that don't have any point or
consequence. After the surgery, the movie just makes us wait for those
final ten minutes when Taylor and Fonda reunite, and we find out if
this marriage can be saved. But by then, we the audience are so bored
that we don't care one way or another what happens. Although Ash Wednesday
isn't an actively bad movie, it's so utterly pointless that you'll
likely be at the end as angry as if it were more carelessly made.
Check
for availability on Amazon (VHS)
See also: Breezy, The Great Smokey Roadblock, My First Mister
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