The film heroes who involve me most aren't saints, or even rebels. They're everyday people who are accosted by wrong done to them and face their predicament: Frank Perry's film is about a stunningly tolerant young woman who has by some means gotten herself married to the most arrogant imbecile in Manhattan. He's narcissistic, heartless, self-unaware, childish and bitchy. He backs "his" kids against his wife. He thinks her a household drone, suited to chores during the day, and, perhaps, a "little roll in de hay" at night. He debases her in the presence of others, as he does himself, too, by his unashamed status-seeking. Does she loathe him? Not precisely.
Set in chic Central Park West and the East 50s among vigilant and quite well-heeled people, this engrossing oddity is to considerable degree about the routine and the material environment of its principals. Benjamin, a law partner, seeks recognition by that exclusively New York influential society that exists by and for the distinction of its style and the legal tender of its judgments. To this end, he buys art and wine, attends openings, reads Variety and cruelly directs his wife.
Snodgress, attractive, straight-haired, blonde, Smith, civilized, mild, tormented not just by her husband but also by a pair of repugnant daughters, finds respite of sorts in the bed of Langella, a writer whose fallacy is that he's without misconceptions and who's as fanatical with his sex as Jonathan is with his wine cellar or Eskimo bird nonchalantly flaunted on the coffee table. While her world is mad, Tina is rather commonsensical. She's not even, to recognize the jibe in the title, very overtly outraged as she must be, and at the end her triumph, minor and very awkward, are the conquests of greater emotional and psychological stability, bringing about awareness over action.
Frank Perry and his screenwriter wife's provocative, offbeat film is keen to jiggle around with its concept of personality, actually to see those ideas as a deception in their own right, in its beautifully dramatic performances, and in its steadfastness to its visual restraint.
Among the cast, Snodgress, lean, with a hoarse voice and an astuteness that persistently saves her from sentimentality, has the benefit, as the point-of-view character, of being followed but never precisely clarified, as opposed to Benjamin and Langella. Both men are characterized by their fixations, and both in due course helpless without their sufferer's indulgence. It seems for that reason all the more notable that they've both intensified their performances, Benjamin for caricature and Langella for personal ambiguity in a skillfully multifarious take-off, beyond the promise of their written roles.
The Perrys' spiritual awakening is a film of interiors, with hardly any outer walls, which it deals with not so much with an eye for precise nuance as with a readiness to work through hemmed-in places. Mainly in the scenes between Snodgress and Langella, in an East Side apartment in which the afternoon sunlight over Queens and the river looks virtually as exquisite as in life, Perry has positioned his actors within a thoughtful geometry formed by the interaction between walls, furniture, faces, bodies and the facilitating confines of the movement within the frame. In these scenes, and some others, Diary of a Mad Housewife eludes its genre, its comprehension of affairs and intentions, and becomes the class of current and well-structured predicament that indicates great filmmaking.
Set in chic Central Park West and the East 50s among vigilant and quite well-heeled people, this engrossing oddity is to considerable degree about the routine and the material environment of its principals. Benjamin, a law partner, seeks recognition by that exclusively New York influential society that exists by and for the distinction of its style and the legal tender of its judgments. To this end, he buys art and wine, attends openings, reads Variety and cruelly directs his wife.
Snodgress, attractive, straight-haired, blonde, Smith, civilized, mild, tormented not just by her husband but also by a pair of repugnant daughters, finds respite of sorts in the bed of Langella, a writer whose fallacy is that he's without misconceptions and who's as fanatical with his sex as Jonathan is with his wine cellar or Eskimo bird nonchalantly flaunted on the coffee table. While her world is mad, Tina is rather commonsensical. She's not even, to recognize the jibe in the title, very overtly outraged as she must be, and at the end her triumph, minor and very awkward, are the conquests of greater emotional and psychological stability, bringing about awareness over action.
Frank Perry and his screenwriter wife's provocative, offbeat film is keen to jiggle around with its concept of personality, actually to see those ideas as a deception in their own right, in its beautifully dramatic performances, and in its steadfastness to its visual restraint.
Among the cast, Snodgress, lean, with a hoarse voice and an astuteness that persistently saves her from sentimentality, has the benefit, as the point-of-view character, of being followed but never precisely clarified, as opposed to Benjamin and Langella. Both men are characterized by their fixations, and both in due course helpless without their sufferer's indulgence. It seems for that reason all the more notable that they've both intensified their performances, Benjamin for caricature and Langella for personal ambiguity in a skillfully multifarious take-off, beyond the promise of their written roles.
The Perrys' spiritual awakening is a film of interiors, with hardly any outer walls, which it deals with not so much with an eye for precise nuance as with a readiness to work through hemmed-in places. Mainly in the scenes between Snodgress and Langella, in an East Side apartment in which the afternoon sunlight over Queens and the river looks virtually as exquisite as in life, Perry has positioned his actors within a thoughtful geometry formed by the interaction between walls, furniture, faces, bodies and the facilitating confines of the movement within the frame. In these scenes, and some others, Diary of a Mad Housewife eludes its genre, its comprehension of affairs and intentions, and becomes the class of current and well-structured predicament that indicates great filmmaking.