Play It as It Lays

It’s an essential picture.

Play It as It Lays is an astringent, cynical movie that ultimately manages to spin one single timid thread of hope.

For Didion the beach, the desert, the freeways and the plastic extravagances of architecture were metaphors. For Director Perry they are just locations.

The movie shares the book's anesthetized quality, but without the acute sensory awareness of a person going under, and with only a little of its hard, brittle humor.

The movie feels like a remake of the book. But it has lost the book’s accumulating sense of dread -- possibly because the splintered opening doesn’t help you get your bearings the way the splintering in the book did.

If you were to imagine a celluloid ancestor to Mulholland Drive's Diane Selwyn, she'd probably look a lot like Maria Wyeth, the heroine of Frank Perry's acerbic Play It As It Lays

Play It as It Lays is the rare adaptation of a literary masterpiece that lives up to the source material, and a fitting cinematic tribute to the power of Didion’s pen.

…a searing portrait of a world that drives a person to madness…

No question the picture has a unique look to it, but the lack of any humanity is its downfall.

[Frank] Perry's directional flourishes and the chilling performances by Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, and a few others, make it a work that is more fascination than turn-off.