Not Drowning

By W.A.H.

STEVIE Directed by Robert Enders Screenplay by Hugh Whitemore

Stevie Smith was an English poet who dwelt almost all her 69 spinster years (1902-71) in a grubby suburb of London.

She spoke fondly of death as "a servant" who comes when called, but she flubbed a suicide attempt. Her one beloved companion, an aunt, thought her writings were bosh. In her best-known poem she wrote:

"I was further out than you thought/ And not waving but drowning." A movie about Stevie Smith seems unlikely, but this one is strangely appealing.

Stevie awkwardly mingles cinematic language (flashbacks in sepia) and theatrical style (asides spoken into the camera). The core of the film -- the domestic life of Stevie and her "lion aunt" -- is insistently naturalistic, yet Stevie is as cluttered with brickbat metaphors as the cottage parlor is with bric-a-brac. But if the camera eye too often blinks, the film's mind and heart are humanly acute. The dialogue deftly threads domestic chitchat and Big Themes: the detachment of the artist, the terrifying uncontrollability of life. And at the film's center is the simple trust binding a girl and her aunt.

As the aunt, Mona Washbourne has only to loosen her hair and widen her eyes to be transformed from a bustling peas ant into a feeble dotard, nodding off after lunch. Glenda Jackson has specialized in self-absorbed eccentrics, but, as Stevie, she makes the familiar lilts and snappings sound new. Through the subtlest shadings of this fiercely independent soul, Jackson gradually recedes from the viewer's awareness, and the gentle Stevie takes over. The film's movement toward American release has been even more gradual; it was made in 1978. Now Stevie is here, not drowning but sailing with two splendid characters and performers.

-- W.A.H.

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