The complexity of Lillian Hellman’s characters is fascinating. Our position towards each one of them is constantly teased. And as we are torn between conflictual feelings of comprehension, sympathy, or hatred, a harsh sociopolitical message starts to bite and take shape in the back of our minds.
The whole final act is no less than astonishing. In its climatic epilogue, Bette Davis’s monstrous Regina Giddens looks down from the once imposing staircase of the sumptuous family house as they were about to crumble. Her final words for her fleeting daughter are as bitter, brutal, honest—but also disillusioned—as she’s always been. And as the film itself is. ‘Alexandra, I’ve come to the end of my rope. Somewhere there’s got to be what I want too. Life goes too fast. You can go where you want, do what you want, think what you want. I’d like to keep you with me but I won’t make you stay. No, I won’t make you stay.’ Young Alexandra, now an adult, is not less of a determined woman than her mother is in a time led even more by men than today. ‘You couldn’t, Mama,’ says young Alexandra, now an adult, and not less of a determined woman. ‘Because I don’t want to stay with you. Because I’m beginning to understand about things. Addie said there were people who ate the earth and those that stood around and watched them do it. And just then Uncle Ben said the same thing. Really the same thing. Tell him from me, Mama, I’m not going to watch you do it.’ But have we started to understand about things too, or have we accepted to be the ones who eat the earth? Or worse, become those who watch?
