A Streetcar Name Desire

A Streetcar Named Desire, Elia Kazan’s lauded adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning play by the same name, takes the uncomfortably real prose of Tennessee Williams’ most famous high melodrama and adds a layer of visual metaphor that would be impossible without the freedom allowed by the voyeuristic eye of the camera. Before seeing the movie, I had had the good fortune to see the play performed on stage by a high quality professional theater company. I didn’t really care for it. The same is true for the movie. I can recognize, and will even mention in glowing terms in this review, the many brilliant narrative devices, nuanced uses of interpersonal conflict for developing character, and (in the case of the film) dazzling technical flourishes that make for something that is an undeniably good bit of storytelling. Despite all that, I didn’t really enjoy it. Not everything is for everyone and this one is geared for a different temperament than mine.

One of the things that Streetcar is most known for is its acting. Marlon Brando’s performance as Stanley Kowalski is frequently cited as the best performance of his career and is also given a great deal of credit for bringing the techniques of Adler, Strasberg, and Meisner to Hollywood. For me, the performance is hit and miss, though more hit than miss. Most of the time, the naturalism of Brando’s performance brings the blue collar brusqueness of Kowalski to life. However, there are an unfortunate number of times where the performance interferes with the material. Most notable to me were times in which Brando’s diction, which is purposely made less clear for realism, was so unclear as to be unable to make out the line delivery. Given how important the prose is to something like a Tennessee Williams play, this frustrated me.

Another performance of note is that of Vivien Leigh. Initially, Leigh’s performance stands in stark contrast to the naturalistic performances of most of the rest of the main cast. Her character comes across as overacted. She seems overly flighty, nervous, and with plenty of strange affectations. However, this actually fits her character – someone who has suffered greatly and whose reactions to that stress has inadvertently pushed her behaviors out of mainstream social conventions. When you take in the totality of the piece, there is a masterful performance bringing this broken person to life. However, getting through that initial period where both her character’s annoying mannerisms and what appears to be acting out of step with the rest of the cast can be challenging.

On the topic of Blanche’s many personal faults, the movie really impressed me with its ability to tackle complex psychological issues. It strikes me as amazingly ahead of its time on the issues that it presents. I have, in the past, given some leeway to films that attempt to touch on topics of mental health for doing the best with what was likely understood at the time. This is not necessary for Streetcar. Perhaps relying on strictly the observable behaviors of people, and therefore not needing the underlying psychological motivations, Streetcar is able to express characters suffering anxiety attacks, repressed traumas, and even something as subtle as the dynamics of an abusive marriage kept together largely through raw, animal sexuality. This is good writing in a vacuum, but for 1951 it is astounding.

Another thing that really works is the way in which Kazan uses cinematic language to reinforce the themes of the piece. Streetcar is about a kettle of interpersonal issues placed on an unrelenting stove until it all boils over in catastrophic fashion. This idea is amplified in the movie in a number of ways. For starters, the movie expands the amount of locations somewhat. This does cause the piece to lose a little of the claustrophobia of three increasingly incompatible people stuck in a small one bedroom apartment, but what it gives up in pressure it makes up with heat. The movie always emphasizes the heat. Despite the story taking place over several months, the movie never relents on the sweat-inducing high humidity and high heat of a New Orleans summer. Characters are constantly dressing down, wiping their brows, and fanning themselves through the oppressive weather, even at night. Additionally, through the placement of the camera, the movie is able to keep the pressure up in ways other than the confined location, by keeping the camera close to its subjects and frequently framing close shots with multiple people in them to make characters feel stuffed together.

The locations outside the house also all serve a purpose. In particular I want to talk about the street shots and the courtyard. The street serves largely a metaphorical role. The old ornate lattice work and other symbols of thoughtful design and wealth, adorning houses in rundown neighborhoods, surrounded by gaudily lit dance joints, bars, and theaters says as much about New Orleans as it does some of the characters that inhabit it. The courtyard serves multiple roles: allowing clashes between upstairs and downstairs neighbors to be visualized; creating up/down and inside/outside blocking, framing, and character movement; and making a space for the drama to “spill out into” which, by leaving the apartment, metaphorically breaks the barrier of the action from the private of the interior to the public of the exterior.

One thing that made it hard for me to like Streetcar, other than its hit and miss naturalistic line readings, is that there basically isn’t any character whose point of view makes them worth getting invested in, whether as a hero or an antihero. Stella is meek and useless, Stanley is a jealous drunkard and a brute, and Blanche, while ultimately made a tragic character worth pitying, spends most of the movie as annoyingly elitist, obliviously self-involved, and inappropriately flirtatious. Even the aw-shucks every-man Mitch eventually shows himself to be judgemental to a fault. Movies with mostly unlikable characters exist on a spectrum from everyone is a bad person but one is the antihero I’m rooting for, like Clint Eastwood’s character in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, to everyone is a bad person and they are so awful my apathy about them ruins the movie, like everyone in 54. A Streetcar Named Desire is a much, much better movie than 54, but similarly lacks that gripping antihero type character to really get me invested. This doesn’t detract from its objective qualities as a movie, as it does with other movies I’ve seen such as Election, but it is an element that made it harder for me to enjoy myself despite recognizing the tremendous talent on display in the film.

A Streetcar Named Desire is a great movie that I didn’t enjoy watching. The direction is largely superb, the acting was groundbreaking in its time, and the story is as compelling as it ever was. Very little of the claustrophobic character drama is diminished by its age as its fundamental conflicts, over money, jealousy, abuse, and sexual appetite, remain resonant even as the sensibilities grafted on top of them have changed. It just wasn’t something I loved watching. Not a swing and a miss, mind you, but more of a swing and a base hit. The little things, like the lines buried in poor diction for the sake of naturalism, to the big things, like what irredeemably flawed people all the characters are, made it a tough watch. However, as I sat down to write this review, and weighed the numerous accomplishments of the film against the things I personally didn’t like about it, I began convincing myself that the things I dislike were perhaps petty and insignificant, the good being remembered and the bad forgotten as if I was becoming nostalgic for the film just days after watching it. Perhaps given more time, I will come around to love A Streetcar Named Desire. However, for the time being, the film and the play hold the same position for me: things I can acknowledge are good but that, at least for the duration of watching, I wasn’t won over.

Would Recommend: If you like high drama, or movies that get better the more you think about them.

Would Not Recommend: If awful people being awful to each other turns you off, no matter how well its written.