Rating: 
Summary: Excellent movie!
Review: "Tom and Viv" was an excellent examination of the human condition. The way in which the relationship between the title characters is both explicit and implicit is true genius. This movie will draw no lines for you. You are forced to come away with your own conclusions. I have heard people say that they had no investment in either character. I feel that was the point. The viewer is forced to disect the relaionship. It examines love in true deconstructionist style. If you are looking for a movie about the pain and confusion that is any relationship, this is for you I will finish by saying this: I was not the same after watching this movie.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent movie!
Review: "Tom and Viv" was an excellent examination of the human condition. The way in which the relationship between the title characters is both explicit and implicit is true genius. This movie will draw no lines for you. You are forced to come away with your own conclusions. I have heard people say that they had no investment in either character. I feel that was the point. The viewer is forced to disect the relaionship. It examines love in true deconstructionist style. If you are looking for a movie about the pain and confusion that is any relationship, this is for you I will finish by saying this: I was not the same after watching this movie.
Rating: 
Summary: So much more to the story than this
Review: And yet the movie is too long. What's to "dissect" in their relationship? She's mentally unstable, he's incredibly straightlaced ... and the film doesn't feel it has to show us any more than this, over and over. I realize it's constrained by a) being adapted from a play and b) the Eliot estate's stinginess with permission to quote (I do like the way some lines from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" are sprinkled innocuously in the dialogue, though). But it sure makes him out to be the bad guy, staying married to her only because he's in charge of her family's estate and good Anglicans do not get divorced. You see the trouble she had, and then some, but you don't see that he, too, was pushed to the edge of a nervous breakdown in 1921. As a longtime fan of Eliot's poetry, I can certainly that the writers and directors of this film have an understanding of its dispassionate nature and the man who could create that ... but there had to be more to Old Possum than this stiff and cold portrait.
Rating: 
Summary: Sliced Version
Review: Careful: This DVD release of TOM AND VIV cuts my favorite scene contained in the original VHS edition--the one in which Viv dresses in disguise and goes to a public reading and book signing given by Tom, who graciously signs her book and pretends not to know her. If anyone else noticed this and has an explanation, please post!
Rating: 
Summary: Plain and Simple
Review: It's plain and simple that TS Eliot was a monster!! Viv was a highly intelligent, creative and very misunderstood woman. Good Grief, she was married to a stick who had no business marry a woman with all her livliness. Today, Viv would be the life of the party, and Tom, Tom who!! She had no where to go with all her creativity and that would make anyone mad. She was suffering from hormonal imbalance, not insanity. Poor Viv. There was no one who understood what she was going through. And those ridiculous doctors! Idiots!! And then with HER money, he has her commited. A perfectly sane woman commited and just freaking leaves her there!!! But the part in the movie that I loved, was when her mother let him have it. If I were Viv's mother, I probably would have said it the same calm and classy way she did and then I would've of added by screaming "Now give me back every penny of Viv's money, you ratbastard!!!
I came away feeling that Tom realized what a terrible mistake he had made but it did'nt make me feel any better. Makes you think twice about these "so-called geniuses!!
Rating:
Summary: if in doubt, blame a woman's menstrual cycle
Review: the first thing that i ever read by elliot was a loooooong time ago in elementary school. it was this cute rhyme-y poem about cats. so i always pictured elliot in a warm and fuzzy way- as being maybe a sweetish sort. i had no idea he was such a supercreep!! he pretty much takes this delightfully eccentric woman (that'd be viv) and uses her for her money and creativity. he sucks all the life out of her, all the brilliance, and very thievishly incorporates it into his "own" writing. the whole time he acts all cold and aloof and smarmy, sorta sighing and shaking his head at the mere thought of viv in this way that says "oh that woman is insane, it's so difficult for poor together genius me..." when, in fact, she's not at all INSANE she just behaves a bit kooky-ly. in the end, elliot talks everyone into thinking she's dangerously mentally ill and he has her committed!!! it's an extraordinary movie, and the acting is wonderful. but beware: the whole thing is quite frustrating to watch if you're the type who likes to see happy-endingish endings. any lingering cozy, cat-poet illusions will be shattered!
Rating:
Summary: supercreepiness examined
Review: the first thing that i ever read by elliot was a loooooong time ago in elementary school. it was this cute rhyme-y poem about cats. so i always pictured elliot in a warm and fuzzy way- as being maybe a sweetish sort. i had no idea he was such a supercreep!! he pretty much takes this delightfully eccentric woman (that'd be viv) and uses her for her money and creativity. he sucks all the life out of her, all the brilliance, and very thievishly incorporates it into his "own" writing. the whole time he acts all cold and aloof and smarmy, sorta sighing and shaking his head at the mere thought of viv in this way that says "oh that woman is insane, it's so difficult for poor together genius me..." when, in fact, she's not at all INSANE she just behaves a bit kooky-ly. in the end, elliot talks everyone into thinking she's dangerously mentally ill and he has her committed!!! it's an extraordinary movie, and the acting is wonderful. but beware: the whole thing is quite frustrating to watch if you're the type who likes to see happy-endingish endings. any lingering cozy, cat-poet illusions will be shattered!
Rating:
Summary: if in doubt, blame a woman's menstrual cycle
Review: The first time I viewed this film (about 3 or 4 years ago), I too was confused about plot details, particularly what exactly was mentally and/or physically wrong with Vivian. But even in my ignorance/innocence, I didn't find it necessary to angrily ridicule her as the crazed hag who threatened to ruin the great T.S. Eliot's literary career (and I never felt that way about Zelda Fitzgerald either--call me humane--despite what my learned English professors said to the contrary--"Oh, poor Scott and Tom, having to deal with 'women's issues'). The focus of Tom and Viv is on Viv, not Tom, because, as the film explains in the beginning, Vivian's brother, Morris, felt guilty about abandoning his sister to a mental hospital. If you watch this film to reaffirm your illusions of how great literary production was once again stifled by a woman, you would do better to check the library for critical books on Eliot circa 1950-90. I may be looking through non-rose-colored glasses, but this film does not intend to redeem Eliot (although it does not completely villify him either), so it should not be gawked at for its failure to do so. Why is it so hard for us to admit our "great literary gods"--Shakespeare, Dickens, Frost, Fitzgerald, and, yes, TS Eliot too--were really monsters? It is important to understand that the late Victorian conception of mental illness as most often applied to women was directly linked to very sketchy and incorrect knowledge of her reproductive organs. In short, a woman was more prone to hysteria than a man simply because she had a uterus. Hysteria/uterus. Look it up. And when watching the film, pay close attention to the doctor's description of "moral insanity" and the ludicrous questions the doctors ask Vivian in order to assess her sanity. If that doesn't gain your sympathy for Viv over Tom, then watch the manner in which Viv is informed of the news that she is in fact "morally insane." Most disturbing to this viewer is not the news that as Lyndall Gordon's recently revised biography of Eliot points out, he was an imperfect man (to say the least). Most disturbing are the reviews of this film that continue to blame Vivian Eliot, after watching a film designed to help us understand the complexities of this couple's relationship, not to mention the old cliche--"it takes two to tango!" Oh yes, I too love The Great Gatsby, The Waste Land, but there's no denying that Prufrock's got some serious sexual hang-ups when it comes to women. Why is that still so horrifying?
Rating:
Summary: Not with a bang, OR a whimper -- just a stiff upper lip.
Review: This film is a portrait of the marriage of T.S. Eliot and his highly eccentric first wife, Vivienne. There is love between them, real love. However, Vivienne's fitful outbursts and T.S.'s ridiculously conformist ways try their love more and more, as the film goes on. They are a star crossed couple, all right -- T.S. has stars in his eyes, as he yearns toward English propriety, and Viv seems to have stars spinning around her head half the time, like a cartoon of a dazed person. Miranda Richardson is fantastic as Vivienne, she steals every scene she's in. Not that Willem Dafoe gives her much of a struggle -- he plays T.S. Eliot as a very cold, distant sort of conformist. Both actors are excellent, as are Rosemary Harris, playing Viv's compassionate, enduring, regal yet human mother; and Tim Dutton, playing Viv's likeable, somewhat befuddled brother, Maurice.Watch for the sad ending, with unloved, unappreciated Viv rusting her life away in an asylum... She deserved better -- even when she was at her most crazed, she always had spunk. She fought the good fight -- she was driven crazy by things that SHOULD drive people crazy, it wasn't her fault she had a chemical problem that kept her from dealing with things the way most people do. T.S., I thought, was almost as sad, as the American poet who becomes a British subject. We seem to be presented with a choice of two destinies here -- Viv keeps her soul, but loses her life, or at least the freedom to Live it. T.S. keeps the freedom to live his life, but, in a very real sense, he loses his soul. I was left wishing T.S. Eliot had spirited Viv off to free America, away from the stifling pressures of England, and led a life as an English teacher in his hometown of St. Louis, taking his students on field trips to Mark Twain's All-American birthplace up the river in Hannibal... Maybe they both would have been happier, without all the pressures to conform and "play the game" in England. A movie with interesting parallels to this one, if anyone's interested, is the German film "Mephisto," starring Klaus Maria Brandauer. There is the same theme of the self-deluding artist, making too-extreme concessions to the politics of the world around him, and involved in incredibly damaging relationships with the women in his life. Another film viewers might like is the Italian film "Il Conformista," by Bernardo Bertolucci. There are numerous parallels. This is a very interesting piece of filmmaking. I really recommend it. Two thumbs up.
Rating:
Summary: "I can make you happy my darling"
Review: Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Missouri on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees. After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank. Variously diagnosed with "moral insanity," anorexia and hysteria, Vivienne Haigh-Wood suffered from severe menstrual symptoms most of her life, as well as an inherited tendency for manic depression. Having collided in their desperation to escape their mothers, she and Tom married in 1915, to their families' disapproval and to Tom's quickly encroaching disgust. By the time Vivienne was committed to an asylum in 1938, five years after T. S. Eliot deserted her, she was a lonely, occasionally demented figure. Shunned by literary London, she was the neurotic wife whom Eliot had left behind. Tom and Viv, a gorgeously produced, but terribly sad movie, begins after Tom and Vivienne have met and focuses on their troubled the marriage. The opening scenes show Vivienne fraught with headaches, sudden violent mood swings, irregular periods and showing her finding a type of solace and security in her relationship with Tom. Told from the point of view of both Tom and Vivienne, the movie is judiciously divided into four parts: 1915 - when Tom and Viv are courting, and when Vivienne shows signs of mental illness: 1919, straight after the war, when Tom is beginning to achieve notoriety as a poet; 1932, when Vivienne's illness is beginning to cause public embarrassment to her family, and 1944, after she has been finally committed to the Northumberland House sanitarium. At first, her family is extremely hesitant to allow the marriage between Tom and Vivienne to take place. Her brother Maurice - stylishly played by Tim Dutton - neglects to tell Tom about her "troubles," and Vivienne's father accuses Tom of being after the family money. Tom, at the time, is a struggling poet, living in an attic in the City with Bertrand Russell who is considered "the most hated man in all of London." Tom feels that poetry is a "mugs game" but he tries to appeal to the good judgment of Vivienne's mother - played with remarkable grace by Rosemary Harris - to let him into the family. Vivienne desperately wants to make Tom happy, and it is to Miranda Richardson's credit that the viewer really gets a sense of Vivienne's quiet desperation. Vivienne is also very supportive of Tom - she reads for him and assists in getting his poetry published; he relies on her completely - she's his "first audience." Willem Defoe brings a quiet and understated elegance to the role, and he expertly conveys Elliot's obvious love for Vivienne, while at the same time expressing a silent frustration over their relationship. As Vivienne steadily spins out of control, becoming more emotionally erratic, Tom realizes that he's married to a woman "that he loves, but everything that he does with her falls apart." Although he eventually contributed to Vivienne's institutionalization, she remains an honest person, who sticks by Tom, and his beliefs and she spiritually never really leaves him. With a fine sense of period detail, the film gracefully and elegantly portrays life during the Edwardian era - the stuffy but gorgeous drawing rooms, the hats, the frocks and the newly invented motorcars. Tom and Viv is a fine-looking period piece that is emotionally quite heart wrenching, and the movie contains some of the best performances from some of the finest actors in the business. Mike Leonard June 04.
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