Review of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) by Kenneth L — 12 Jul 2009

Never have I seen so much malice and hatred in one movie; watching it is a little like being punched in the face. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (who were married in real life) give phenomenal, painful performances as a couple with the marriage from hell.

She's a crass, vulgar, sexually agressive alcoholic; he's a passive-agressive, sniping, depressed alcoholic. They use a nice young man and his pretty but bland wife against each other in a perverted game of checkers where the goal is to do as much emotional damage to the other person as possible.

These people are to emotional destruction what the Transformers are to physical destruction. The dialogue, based on a famous play, is constantly coming up with new, creative, sickly funny ways for the characters to spew their black bile at each other.

It's hard to believe that Mike Nichols, who directed The Graduate and the hilarious The Bird Cage, started his career with this movie and also recently made the similarly nasty Closer. It's a great movie, and deservedly won a few Oscars and was nominated for nearly all of them, but gosh, I don't know if I could bear to watch it again.