Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Two-Disc Special Edition)
by Mike Nichols
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DVD details
Actor: Agnes Flanagan, Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal, Richard Burton, Sandy DennisDirector: Mike Nichols
Brand: WARNER HOME VIDEO
Cinematographer: Haskell Wexler
Editor: Sam O'Steen
Producer: Ernest Lehman
Writer: Ernest Lehman
Writer: Edward Albee
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; Latin (Original Language); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); Korean (Subtitled)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 131 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-12-05
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- Mike Nichols' first directorial effort represents a milestone in psychological realism and "foul" language in American cinema. George and Martha, as played superbly and without vanity by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, are as far from the bourgeois 1950s perfect married couple as you can get, alternatively badgering, berating, abusing and loving each other, both alone and accompanied by t
DVD Reviews of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Two-Disc Special Edition)
DVD Review: Not As Good as the Critics Say
Summary: 3 Stars
There are a few distinctively American artists -- Norman Mailer comes immediately to mind. And then there are many more pale imitators of European art that happen to be American, and are rewarded because of American chauvinism. Edward Albee falls into the latter camp. There's something powerful and authentic when Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus write about the meaningless and absurdity of the human condition but when Edward Albee writes there's something wildly immature and annoying.
Albee's first work "Zoo Story" which is a childish imitation of "Waiting for Godot" can be forgiven as exactly that: a childish imitation. But what are Albee's excuses for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?"
George (Richard Burton) is a middle-aged small-town college history professor who is married to the college president's daughter Martha (Elizabeth Taylor). Once full of promise and vitality George now resorts to alcohol and bitter violent fights with Martha to pass the time. One night they invite over a couple who are a younger, much more vibrant version of themselves -- and the two take this as an opportunity to reflect on the life they cursed themselves with.
Because Edward Albee is considered a genius and because "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf" is considered one of the greatest films of all time I searched for meaning and substance in the film, and after forty minutes I became desperately bored, began fast forwarding, and then eventually just gave up. There were moments when I did feel that the film was trying to say something but decided it wasn't true because the film didn't really develop that theme and that theme was really juvenile anyway -- I mean, would a serious playwright use for his masterwork the theme that marrying for money and position will only make you miserable?
In the end I could only conclude that this film is merely a visual projection of all the anxieties and phobias, self-loathing and narcissims -- in short, the collected mental masturbation -- of a playwright who just happens be homosexual and childish and depressed. The articulate protagonist is a stand-in for the playwright, someone so witty and luminous yet underappreciated by the world and trapped in an impossible situation with a hysterical wife. The wife Martha represents either the playwright's mother or just a generic impression of all women: violent and insane, selfish and self-indulgent, a whore and a witch.
Albee then takes this disjointed and incoherent worldview, and slaps on a flimsy and hackneyed plot, and puts it on stage -- and everyone calls it art and genius. So why do you hate yourself and the world so much, Mr. Albee, when life is this easy and wonderful?
To be fair this play was written almost half a century ago when psychology wasn't so developed. Back then they did not understand what was "co-dependency" and "bipoloar depression" and "borderline personality disorder" and writers could only re-create these things on paper from the rough sketches of their personal lives. But so what? Great writers are great because they are overly attuned into the peculiar nuances of the human condition: Shakespeare did not have to major in psychology to create the convincing and powerful psychological portraits of Hamlet and MacBeth and King Lear and Othello.
It is perhaps all too common to fear and to misunderstand something, and then quickly dismiss it as "crazy" or worse "genius." "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf" is in the lucky position to find itself labelled as "genius" by a society that fears and misunderstands it more than it appreciates and understands it.
DVD Review: Honestly when i first watched this
Summary: 5 Stars
i didint like it at first
i stiopped it in the middle
i actually missed alot of the movie
now that i have finished it
i really like it
elizabeth taylor and richard burton did
AMAZINGGGGGGG jobs
this movie had great acting
DVD Review: These People Pleasantly Wear You Down With Customer Service.
Summary: 5 Stars
I had a small cosmetic problem with the DVD case I received with my movie. I put the concern out there to the company and before I could predict whether it would matter to them, they RESPONDED. And most agreeably, I might add - all tilted toward the satisfaction of the customer. I actually felt someone was singularly devoting their time and attention to me, not from a customer relations script but from a real sense of trying to understand and remedy my problem. I run a small business myself, and one thing I impress upon my employess is this - mishaps in production and service explain the customer's problem, they do not justify it. That being said, the customer is deserving of something more and above an explanation; they now deserve satisfaction beyond the purchased item. Well, that is exactly what I received. Kudos to the folks at HELVIC55. DVD Review: "Stunt casting" in this boundary-breaking film works, and in fact helps create a masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
I was rather surprised on actually looking up the information to find out that I'd only seen, as far as I can be sure, 5 films starring Elizabeth Taylor and 4 starring her husband at the time this one was made, Richard Burton. That and not having a really clear impression of director Mike Nichols' work, nor having read the Edward Albee play on which the film is based or really knowing much about it besides the typical, often derisive comment that it's "2 hours of people screaming at each other", made me able to watch this film from a position of relative ignorance, which I think made some difference. What little I had seen with Taylor was mostly forgotten, and what I did remember wasn't so positive - she had struck me as a lightweight with a kind of breathless and vapid air about her; and Burton I remembered also from some of his lesser work and action movies that didn't take a lot of chops. So I was altogether unprepared...
A full moon, clouds moving over it, in sharp black and white. Dissolve to a pan from treetops down to a distant building, in the dark, in the fall with the leaves blowing, a college campus perhaps, a man and a woman slowly walking towards the camera, then passing behind a tree, another dissolve to an overhead shot, they look like dolls...George (Burton) an Associate Professor of History at an unnamed small college, and Martha (Taylor) his wife, both in their late 40s or so, walking home after an event. Entering their old two-story house, Martha exclaims, "What a dump" in an exaggerated tone and then proceeds to badger George to tell her what film it's from. They banter back and forth, getting progressively more testy; they go upstairs, lie on the bed, and Martha starts singing "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (to the tune of "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush") as they start acting more tenderly; it was all a game, perhaps?
Then Martha informs George that she's invited a younger couple over; they were at a faculty party it seems, and Martha had an eye on the young man (George Segal, his character never named) who with his young wife Honey (Sandy Dennis) shows up a few moments later, as both George and Martha are getting more liquored up - and more bitchy with each other. The young couple comes in, more drinks are poured, the fighting continues, the dialogue intensifies, then dies, then re-ignites, like a fugue, like the wonderful Alex North score which at all times reminds us of the tenderness lying underneath the hostility in a marriage that clearly did not turn out the way either party wanted it to - but is nonetheless the defining, central, impossible-to-give-up element in both lives. So it continues for two hours, as Martha seduces the young man; as both Martha and George try to outdo each other in ferocity and cruelty, as physical violence seems just around the corner, and a kiss and tears around the next. And always there is wit, and always there is the drama of wondering how, and if, the younger couple will seek to escape this dark path that lies as an example in front of them; and always there is more and more liquor.
There's never a dull moment, never even a merely OK moment in this spectacularly compelling, funny, and heartwrending piece of work. Haskell Wexler's laserlike sharp, high-contrast photography conveys the shadowy world of noir or crime drama, the underbelly of this tormented couple's lives, but also a fantastic never-never land - a swing out back, the roadhouse down the way, a strange beauty of nightly creation and destruction as George and Martha over and over approach and ultimately reject any kind of lasting understanding of each other, circling like the mobile camera that Nichols directs like a master on only his first film. North's score I've mentioned, which evokes Bach and Handel, the classical world of George's bookish life, gentle harp and guitar and other strings for the most part, a calmness in the midst of the crazy inner worlds in front of us.
But it is the actors who are the reason we're watching this, after all, and none of them disappoint. Sandy Dennis and George Segal, at the very beginnings of their careers, hold their own as the alternately frightened and excited young couple, he ambivalent about a marriage out of necessity and a wealthy father-in-law, she a secret heavy drinker and apparently full of sickness-inducing guilt, perhaps out of the marriage, perhaps out of other mysterious reasons. Taylor and Burton, though, are the reasons you're probably watching the film, and they both so far transcend what I knew of them or thought they could do that it was like watching them for the first time. Taylor was only 33 - at least 15 years too young - when shooting started, and put on 30 pounds, lowered her voice and seemed to have ripped all sweetness out of her manner - except for those rare moments when both Liz, and the Martha as she must have been, are allowed to emerge. She seems every bit the disillusioned romantic, a last vestige of the pre-feminist era who knows that there is more to life than her husband, but has never found it and doesn't even really know where to look. She's ferocious, catty, and always angling because she always knows that she's still got it. Her slight upper-crust accent seems to fade in and out in tune with the role she's playing at that moment - scorned wife, loving wife, angry and profane drunk, would-be-intellectual who can't keep up with her husband, snobby daughter of the college president - and much more. Burton is, if anything, even more impressive, though perhaps I'm giving him that mostly for having a slightly larger role, and for being in essence the tragic hero - the man who could never be the great scholar that he wanted to be, the political mover in the school that his wife and father-and-law expected, the lover that she wanted, the father...but that would spoil it.
Albee's best-known work beside the 1962 play on which this was based may be his slightly earlier absurdist "Zoo Story", which is on the surface closer to fantasy than VIRGINIA WOOLF; but this film (and I assume the play) skirts the borders of reality throughout it's length, with at least a couple of moments (stories, really) which are never particularly explained and left very much up to us to decipher or interpret. Is the "Bergin" story that he tells the young man and that gets repeated later, more drunkenly, more angrily, George's real memory of what a schoolmate went through? Is it George's own experience? Is it that of the son", apparently made up, that George and Martha could never have? Is it entirely something from his own imagination, but played out with Martha endlessly in different versions, to different couples and with variations on other games, on previous nights, year after year?
All good things, all good movies, all bad nights and fantastic nights and hard dark nights of the soul must come to the end, and so does VIRGINIA WOOLF die with a whimper, softly, gently, tenderly....desperately.
DVD FEATURES/QUALITY - the transfer on this issue is excellent, soundwise and especially picturewise, beautifully sharp and deep. Two commentary tracks; I've only listened to about half of the track with director Nichols and accolyte Steven Soderbergh but it's very good; the other features cinematographer Wexler. Both featurettes on the making of/impact of the film on the second disc are solid; the Taylor TV bio isn't anything special but isn't bad. Absolutely one of my favorite DVDs.
DVD Review: not a good movie
Summary: 1 Stars
I really don't understand what so many people love about this film. It's a death march. Unrelenting in its tedium. For the life of me, I can't understand why the young couple doesn't just go home! The film drags on the way the night in the film drags on and there's nothing particularly interesting about the characters or the story.
Description of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Movie DVDA word of advice: If George (Richard Burton) and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) ever ask you over for late-night cocktails--pass. On the other hand, if you have the opportunity to see Mike Nichols's scorching film version of Edward Albee's sensational play, don't miss it! Elegantly photographed in crisp black and white by the great Haskell Wexler, the play has been "opened up" for the screen by director Nichols (The Graduate, Primary Colors) and producer-writer Ernest Lehman (North by Northwest) without diluting its concentrated, claustrophobic power. Taylor has never been better or brasher as Martha, letting loose with all the fury of a drunken, frustrated academic's wife on one crazy Walpurgisnacht bender. Burton plays her husband, George, the ineffectual history prof married to the college president's daughter. And George Segal and Sandy Dennis are young, callow Nick and Honey, who have no idea what sort of mind-warping psychological games they're being drawn into. Among the most successful theatrical adaptations (artistically and popularly) ever brought to the screen. The entire principal cast was nominated for Oscars--and Taylor, Dennis, and cinematographer Wexler won. --Jim Emerson
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