An upbringing in the Mormon Church and six seasons as a writer on the HBO TV series Big Love, about the trials and tribulations of a polygamous Mormon family man, provided fledgling movie director Dustin Lance Black with the distinctive, authentic setting in his script for What’s Wrong With Virginia, but it was an aunt, a paranoid schizophrenic, who gave him the lead character, the Oscar-winning screenwriter (Milk) said Thursday at a press conference following his film’s debut Wednesday at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“It started with memories of personal experiences in the South, in this rambunctious, wild, lower-class world I grew up in, and some members of my family in which there is some paranoid schizophrenia – accepted with a buoyancy you don’t often see in film – and an aunt who always struggled to find the light,” Black said.
What’s Wrong With Virginia, starring Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Amy Madigan, Emma Roberts, Yeardley Smith and young Australian actor Harrison Gilbertson, illuminates the complex relationship between a respectable, married small-town Mormon sheriff and his longtime lover, who suffers from the debilitating mental condition and may be the mother of his child.
“I grew up in a Mormon home, where there’s a lot of weight put on the importance of patriarchy, and a lot of pressure on young men to perform, to excel, to be model citizens, and to blend in, because for so long Mormons have been rejected by the mainstream,” Black said.
“The regular Mormon Church still has a belief system that includes polygamy, at least in the afterlife, and its greatest heroes and the church’s founders were polygamists. How do you gel those beliefs with the need to excel and to be seen as a true American?
“I watched Mormon men struggle with this, and so I created the (sheriff’s) character just to watch him walk that line.”
Harris, whose real-life wife (Madigan) plays his on-screen wife in the controversial movie, said he was attracted by the conflicts in the sheriff’s psyche.
“A man in his position in the Church is pretty much in a box, in terms of his aspirations and the way he has to live. But then this woman (Connelly’s character) is a breath of fresh air for him. She’s fun, energetic, unpredictable, beautiful and free … she’s a little crazy, but so what?
“And it’s not really bad morally, since it was for political expediency that polygamy was outlawed in the Church the first place.”
Conflict was what attracted Connelly as well.
“(Virginia) was dealt a pretty lousy deck,}” she said. “She had numerous obstacles to overcome – mental illness, no parents, no support – but she always bats against the odds, she always picks herself up, she’s always trying to shine goodness and to do right by her son. In her own messy, unconventional, unfortunate way she overcomes her need for him and to come through for him, by letting him go. That’s a really moving story.”
Smith – a voice-over specialist best known for her vocal characterization of Lisa in The Simpsons – co-produced What’s Wrong With Virginia with veteran producer/director Gus Van Sant. Her small part in the picture was no accident, she told reporters.
“The only way I could get into the film was to buy my way in.”
The results were mixed, Smith added. She was “so high on the food chain” that the cast and crew avoided her.
“So I did a lot of knitting. I found the job of executive producer was not particularly creative … but it was interesting to see how the sausage gets made from that perspective.”
Greg Quill
Actors Ed Harris (left) and Jennifer Connelly attend a news conference for the film What's Wrong with Virginia during the Toronto International Film Festival, Sept. 16, 2010. Reuters
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