US 117m Dir: Irving Rapper Key Cast: Bette Davis
Now, Voyager feels pretty ahead of it's time as it's a film that is largely about mental health and psychotherapy. The book of which it is based by Olive Higgins Prouty was one of, if not the, first to do this. it was based on Prouty's own experiences and she went on to support her friend Sylvia Plath after a suicide attempt.
The film centres around Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) who is a drab and repressed spinster who has been controlled and verbally abused by her mother all her life. Her sister-in-law manages to get her to go to a sanatorium run by Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains) and away from her mother she blossoms. She goes out into the world and falls in love but is never quite sure she has fully recovered.
I really like the themes of this film but it doesn't really do much with it's story. It's possible that the Hays Production Code has an influence on this but then again it appears to follow fairly closely to the novel. It's perhaps a sign of the time it was made in. A film about mental health would have been revolutionary at the time but I still had a sense they kept things relatively light and clean here when the reality is much, much darker.
Once Charlotte has left the sanatorium this actually has a lot in common with many screwball comedies of the time, sharing plot elements rather than humour. There's a long section which is really the bulk of the film about Charlotte thinking about who she should marry and very little happens.
That felt like my main issue with the film. The start is good, the end not bad but very little actually happens in the middle. It sanitises the experience of a mental health issue and fails to really dive into the issues, never actually resolving them. This was something even critics of the time were saying and it feels an even greater issue now. This is a film I could see having a modern remake that goes deeper into the mental health stuff, though I'm not sure who on earth you could get to play the same character as Bette Davis.
I liked plenty of the ideas here but they are touched upon rather than explored in any depth and most of the film is wishy-washy nothingness.
Comments
Post a Comment