Tom & Viv : A Movie About T.S. Eliot and His Wife Vivian Haigh-Wood

A Marriage of Poetry...and Tragedy

I had barely heard of this film but two Academy Award nominations can’t be far off the mark. Miranda Richardson and Rosemary Harris were nominated in 1994 for Best Actress and Best Supporting actress respectively.

What starts out to be a cardboard cutout Brit Flick for the arthouse crowd surprises midway in. This is not the story of glamorous British Literati biopic but a painful story of doubt and remembered regret.

Willem Dafoe plays T. S. Eliot before he was T. S. Eliot. Miranda Richardson plays Vivian Haigh-Wood, a British upper-crust girl of 1912 with spirits so high she electrifies the quadrangle at Oxford with her charisma. Eliot is gently mocked as an American who wants badly to be English.

He would seem to have his dream in Viv. But quickly we learn after the elopement Viv has been hiding some fairly serious secrets from her would-be husband. A stone-faced Willem Dafoe wistfully walks down the water’s edge at Brighton alone. Yes, there were reasons the family couldn’t know him. Viv's hysteric fits have long been in her nature.

The bottles of medicine and stains on the sheets keep us guessing. What happened here? Viv takes all her medications at the same time while her new husband takes a walk. Returning to the hotel, we see there is no honeymoon for him, grasping and coping with his wife’s behavior is his course in life now.

Next he gets to run the gamut of scrutiny from her landed family. Her white-bearded father asks straight out-Is he a cad? A johnny-come-lately? What nobody has told Tom is that Vivian’s medical problems are serious and unalterable. Viv’s mother, played by Rosemary Harris, senses his love for Viv and lets him slowly into the family.

Viv’s younger brother watches as Tom and Viv attempts to lead a newlywed existence based on his poetry. From the first scene, the brother had a foreboding about them he couldn’t share. As the war comes and Eliot is pronounced unfit, Viv’s father gets him a job at Lloyd’s.