Stevie: The Movie

She also confessed, however, that she was never cut out for the business world. She didn't fit in. The pressure of daily life with its crushing routines, the pressure of having to earn a living for decade after decade, the inner isolation, could be overwhelming for a person so dreadfully low on energy, so temperamentally inclined toward despair. "Deeply morbid deeply morbid was the girl who typed the letters," she wrote. It's telling-it certainly wasn't accidental-that she was sitting at her office desk on a gloomy day in y53 when she tried to commit suicide by slashing her wrists. It was just two months after she had written "Not Waving but Drowning."

It's a devastating moment in the film when Stevie's attempted suicide arises-even for those of us who know it's coming. The sadness of the scene -the black melancholy music-is nearly unbearable. It begins neutrally enough with a train coming from a distance and passing under a bridge. (The moving train is one of the refrains in this film, its clear way of marking passageways.) Then the Man is walking slowly toward us across that same bridge. It's a bleak day and something is awry. He intones:

For most of her life Stevie followed an unchanging routine. Every morning she caught the train to her office near the Strand, and every evening she traveled back to Palmers Green, to Avondale Road, and to the Lion Aunt. Life is like a railway station, Stevie said. One day they brought her home early in great distress. Her wrists were bandaged.

White the Man is still talking-explaining-a black taxi is pulling up to the house. Watching the film for the first time, I'm sure I flinched, I almost had to hold up an arm to fend off the sight of Stevie being helped out of that car, crossing her arms as if to hide her wrists, while her worried and shocked aunt waits helplessly by the front door. She's near tears. Stevie goes into the house.

Trevor Howard recites some relevant lines from "Death Came to Me":

I took the knife

Its cruel edge would bite

Into my flesh

Had I the resolution or the art

To bear the smart

And drive it to my heart?

Stevie appears in the corner of the bay window. She looks utterly forlorn, defeated, half mad. The sense of a person drowning is intense. But she doesn't drown. The Man summarizes: "Death, that sweet and gentle friend, failed to respond to her summons. Life continued."

10. Death of a Lion

To her enormous relief, Stevie was retired-pensioned off-from work after her failed suicide attempt. She was greatly remorseful about what had happened, she said, not because of the violent act itself, or at least not only because of the act, but because of the pain she had inflicted on others: Her aunt, her friends in the office, her boss, whom she contended was dreadfully upset but not hugely surprised. ("He knew. Oh yes, he knew.") It shouldn't have happened at the office, she admitted. And so she tried to forget about what she referred to as "that suicide business." She soldiered on.

Mona Washbourne wonderfully portrays the Lion Aunt getting older, forgetting things. She goes out less and less. One looks in on her at night in a plaid bathrobe, her hair combed down for bed, at times in braids. Worrying about the income tax, about Stevie who has just come back from another party, wearing a buttercup-yellow dress and complaining that she looked like one of the sheeted dead.