So, finally women's stories (aka herstories) are being told, but often through the lens of men. Two biopics I tuned into of late tell the story of women married to famous men, and the miserable lives they lead trying to steer their husbands away from their demons, and have their own ambitions squashed.
First I watched I Saw the Light, the 2015 biopic of Hank Williams, who penned an astonishing number of great country songs in his short life. Bob Dylan has named Williams as a key influence in his work (just after Woody Guthrie). Nora Jones and Dylan are among the many artists who have covered Williams songs.
Tom Huddleston as Williams is sufficiently lanky, and does a fine job singing and moving like Hank did onstage, even on "Lovesick Blues," with the characteristic yodeling that earned Williams the moniker "Lovesick Blues Boy." The song's performance at his 1949 Grand Ole Opry debut is depicted, without showing the six encores he earned that day.
We see precious little of Williams's performances in the film, which instead focuses on his turbulent relationship with his first wife, Audrey Sheppard—well played by Elisabeth Olsen—and his mother, played by the always-excellent Cherry Jones. As depicted, Sheppard, a singer/songwriter herself, did much to advance Williams's career, and wanted to share the spotlight with Hank, but she wasn't considered an asset to his career by the (male) musical hierarchy. Hank's alcoholism and womanizing, along with the usual life-on-the-road challenges, helped to tear their marriage apart just before his tragic and untimely death in a car accident in 1953, at the age of 29.
Using her married name Audrey Williams, Sheppard did have a recording career, starting with "Leave Us Women Alone," where she seems to have had her say at last.
Next I watched "The Last Station," depicting the last days of Russian author Leo Tolstoy, in an Academy Award-nominated performance by Christopher Plummer. Playing his wife Sofia "Sonya" Tolstoy is the also-Oscar-nominated Helen Mirren, depicted largely as a money-grubbing shrew objecting vehemently to the machinations of his acolytes, who encourage him to give away his personal property and the copyrights to his books, instead of leaving them to his wife and children, (The couple had 13 children, 8 or 9 of whom survived into adulthood.)
Raised in wealth and privilege, Count Tolstoy enlisted in the Army after gambling debts ruined him. Horrified by the death toll and brutality of war, and inspired by Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, he wrote the sweeping War and Peace, considered by many to be one of the best novels ever written. At one point he went to live among the Bashkirs, a Turkish sect associated with cannabis.
Tolstoy became a "spiritual anarchist" and pacifist, and his ideas on nonviolent resistance, influenced by the teachings of Jesus in the Bible—as expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894)—were an important influence on Mahatma Gandhi, among others. In his last novel Resurrection (1899), the nobleman Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov realizes that the earth cannot really be owned and that everyone should have equal access to its resources and advantages, hinting that Tolstoy had such a view.
The daughter of a court physician and named for Sophia, the goddess of wisdom, the Countess Tolstoy's maternal great-grandfather, Count Pyotr Zavadovsky, was the first Minister of Education in Russia's history. On the eve of their wedding, the 34-year-old Tolstoy famously shared with his 18-year-old bride his diaries, detailing his many previous sexual relations, and the fact that one of the serfs on his family's estate had borne him a son.
Mirren is shown acknowledging this in "The Last Station," and lamenting the fact that while she was an early editor on her husband's writing (copying the lengthy "War and Peace" six times), now she "didn't matter." Sofia was left to shoulder the burdens of running the family farm and raising their children, while dealing with Tolstoy’s disciples showing up and living on the family estate. She contemplates killing herself with an opium overdose, and when Leo leaves her at the very end of his life, she tries to drown herself and is kept from seeing him before he dies. A tragedy as great as the fate of Anna Karenina.
Sofia's diaries weren't published until 100 years after her death, reportedly because Russian authorities did not want negative press on Tolstoy. Her plight brings to mind the famous quote by Karl Marx's mother, who reportedly said, "If only Karell had made capital instead of writing about it."
Both stories made me think of the memoir of Carolyn Cassady, the wife and mother Neal left behind while he took off On the Road. I'll be reading Sofia's diaries and listening to more of Audrey's music.
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