Randa Haines | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Saturdays, I will be reviewing The American Short Story, which ran semi-regularly on PBS in 1974 to 1981. The entire show can be purchased on Prime and found on YouTube and Tubi.

This week, The American Short Story adapts a short story by Katherine Anne Porter.

Episode #16 “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”

(Dir by Randa Haines, originally aired 1980)

Granny Weatherall (Geraldine Fitzgerald) is dying. While the doctor tries to comfort her and the priest tries to provide salvation, Granny obsesses on cleaning her house and getting everything in its proper place. She thinks about how her adult daughter, Cornelia (Lois Smith), is incapable of keeping the house as clean as Granny Weatherall believes it should be. Memories of the past and hallucinations of the present flood her mind and she remembers the time that she was jilted by a suitor and she thinks about how she has to live long enough to destroy the letters that he once wrote her. But the coldness of death is always hovering in the background….

This episode moved a bit slowly but it was effective due to the performance of Geraldine Fitzgerald and also Randa Haines’s direction, which kept the viewer unsure of whether they were seeing reality or if they were just seeing Granny Weatherall’s dying thoughts. The short story itself is written as a stream-of-consciousness and Haines does her best to capture that feeling in her adaptation. One of the main problems with The American Short Story has been that most of the adaptations have struggled to capture the tone of the original stories. The Jilting of Granny Weatherall’s visuals come very close to recreating the power of Katherine Anne Porter’s words.

Next week, The American Short Story wraps up with an adaptation of a James Thurber short story.

So, we all know that The Hurt Locker was the first best picture winner to have been directed by a woman. And we also all know that, when Kathryn Bigelow won her Oscar for that film, she was the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director.

But do you know the title of the first film to be both be directed by a woman and to be nominated for best picture? Well, you probably do now because I’m assuming that you’ve read the title of this post and you’ve seen the picture of the film’s poster above. But, let’s just pretend that you don’t so I can triumphantly say, “The 1986 film Children of a Lesser God was the first nominee for best picture to be directed by a woman!”

And the name of that director was Randa Haines. Never heard of her? You’re probably not alone in that. After making her feature debut with Children of a Lesser God, Haines only directed three more theatrical films. Instead, she’s spent most of her career in television and, if not for the nudity and the language, Children of a Lesser God could probably pass for a well-made Lifetime movie. That’s not necessarily a criticism because I happen to like well-made Lifetime movies. But still, it’s not surprising that Children of a Lesser God was the only 1986 best picture nominee not to receive a nomination for best director.

(For the record, Platoon won best picture and Oliver Stone won best director. Nominated in Haines’s place was David Lynch for Blue Velvet.)

As for the film itself, it’s a well-acted and well-made film. It’s not exactly great in the way that we ideally expect a best picture nominee to be. It’s directed a bit too much like a television movie and the film ends on a happy note that doesn’t exactly feel earned. (If any film would have benefitted from a bittersweet conclusion, it would have been Children of a Lesser God.) Still, at the same time, you can tell why the film was nominated. It deals with a social issue (in this case, the way that the deaf are marginalized by mainstream society) and it’s a romance between … well, I was going to say mature adults but actually, William Hurt was 15 years older than Marlee Matlin when they played lovers in this film, which adds a perhaps unintentional layer of ambiguity to their relationship. Children of a Lesser God was also the first film to feature a deaf performer in a lead role and, when Marlee Matlin won the Oscar for Best Actress, she became both the youngest and, to date, the only deaf actress to win.

Ultimately, Children of a Lesser God is more interesting from a historical point of view than a cinematic one. But the value of history should never be underestimated! It’s a worthy-enough film and Matlin’s angry performance holds up well. (As for William Hurt, how you respond to his performance will depend largely on how much tolerance you have for his voice. Whenever Matlin communicates through sign language, Hurt repeats aloud whatever it is that she’s said. As a result, the film is basically 2 hours straight of William Hurt talking and, on occasion, it’s a bit too theatrical and distracting. If the film were made today, the filmmakers would probably just use subtitles.) Finally, and perhaps most importantly, even if it didn’t lead to bigger things for Randa Haines, Children of a Lesser God did open the door for others to follow.