Stevie: The Movie

The narrator doubles as one of many friends Stevie collected near the end of her life, taking on the urbane persona of someone on the literary fringe. He is driving slowly through the rain, talking to us through the windshield wipers about how he first met Stevie sometime after the war at a noisy, quasibohemian gathering. Stevie mostly complained about George Orwell, who had been her producer at the BBC (the film doesn't mention that the two were consistently rumored to have had an affair): "'He keeps lying to me,' she said. 'I'm bored to death with all the lies."'

All Stevie's car-owning friends complained that she imperiously expected to be ferried around London. The tiresome duties had reached a peak with Stevie becoming, as the Man puts it, "something of a star-turn on the poetry reading circuit." Even so, he says, pausing at the front door, "my affection for her has remained unimpaired"-he takes a long breath and laughs a little to himself-"relatively." The timing is impeccable. Then he rings the bell.

Stevie enters the sitting-room wearing a badly dyed green suit. She wants to know how it Looks. Very nice, the Man says, meaning terrible. (The time she wore it to a poetry reading was in fact notorious.) Stevie taking her time to get ready, dithering around, trying to decide if she should wear a brooch or a locket, changing her plans about possibly staying overnight (she wants to, if asked; he can't), pouring herself a drink. They fall into petty bickering. Here we're treated to Stevie's difficult side. A willful woman who needs to be cherished, the least likeable of her personae. But then the Man says an acute thing about one of Stevie's readings, which I've always suspected to be true because it jives with other accounts:

I remember once sitting at the back of a cheerless school hall while Stevie pranced about on the stage, chanting her poems like an elderly Shirley Temple. It should have been embarrassing, but it wasn't; it was touching, truthful, and haunting.

Listening to the off kilter chant and odd gait of a poet who loved to echo-and fracture-hymns and folk tunes, traditional ballads, whose quirky natural idiom lifted poetry in the direction of song, one was always conscious of poetry as an oral phenomenon, a physical medium, a bodily art. Perhaps wisely, Jackson veers away from Smith's notably performative way of reading her lyrics aloud. Near the end of the film however, she does give one highly intonated and haunting recital of a few stanzas from "Do Take Muriel Out," which she starts by intoning and ends by singing, like her real-life counterpart. The feeling is so strong that I wish she had been let loose to recite the entire poem.

It's incredibly hard to describe the rhythm of a film, its silent visual simultaneities, its tones, its pacing. The matter is complicated when there is music in the background, establishing a mood, creating a feeling, and an actor bringing poetry to the forefront. Here, looking in the oval mirror on the wall (we can see the Lion Aunt's chair reflected on the other side of the room), Jackson begins to speak slowly and in a steeply low voice: