Casting Call: Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking

October 25, 2012

By Christine Spines

• Tweet
• Email
• Sharebar

Joan Didion/Photo © Brigitte Lacombe

• Tweet
• Email
• Sharebar

• Tweet
• Email

Welcome to Word & Fim’s Casting Call, where we exercise our creative muscles by focusing our attention on extraordinary characters from exceptional books – either fiction or nonfiction – and make the case for how we’d cast those roles if given the chance. Note that, here at Word & Film, we’re not casting directors, nor are we producers, agents, or anyone else who has any say in how a film will be cast; we’re simply ardent fans of books and movies who can’t help ourselves from such musings.

“Grief makes us crazy.” With these four words, Robert Pinsky distilled the essence of The Year of Magical Thinking,  Joan Didion’s equally stark and succinct account of her trek out of the dark and disorienting emotional landscape thrust upon her after her husband, John Dunne, died shortly after her daughter fell critically ill in 2003.

Leave it to a poet to capture the crux of the author’s 240-page memoir in one crisp wafer-sized sentence. Leave it to Didion, the virtuoso personal essayist of our time, to construct an elegant and sturdy path down into the unending abyss of loss and the murky state beyond, somewhere between despair and daylight. The Year of Magical Thinking unfolds as an inquiry into the dissonance between her authentically contained response to unfathomable loss and the expectation she deliver a messy meltdown. Didion boldly explores the contours of her own detached response to the tragedy, crystallized in a pivotal moment when, shortly after Dunne suffers a fatal heart attack over dinner and is taken to the hospital, the intake social worker describes the dry-eyed Didion as a “cool customer.” Didion latches onto the phrase and refers to it frequently throughout the rest of the book, a signpost demarcating the gulf between the molten pain of her inner life and the opaque outer shell in which she kept it contained.

To anyone who has ever read any of Didion’s nonfiction, particularly Slouching Toward Bethlehem or Play it as it Lays, to call her a“cool” anything is to state the obvious. More than just a literary or personal affectation, Didion’s minimalist reserve emanates from the core of her being – it’s the filter through which she processes the world – in regard to both incoming experience and outgoing expression. As the book’s title suggests, Didion also investigates the delusional superstitions that take hold in the wake of tragedy and compel even a customer as coolly rational as Didion to hold onto Dunne’s old shoes, just in case he needs them upon his return.

This is Didion at the extreme end of her own scale of grief-induced madness: rationally self-aware in her self-deception and artfully composed in her expression of messy emotion. This disconnect lies at the heart of the book and represents a singular challenge for any actress cast as Didion in any potential film version of The Year of Magical Thinking. Vanessa Redgrave delivered a powerhouse performance as Didion in the 2007 David Hare-directed Broadway adaptation of the book. Cate Blanchett, Seana McKenna, and Fanny Ardant then filled Didion’s no-nonsense shoes as the production traveled around the world.

But none of these formidable talents quite captured the “cool customer” Didion eventually became. This role requires a fierce talent capable of balancing Didion’s stay-calm, carry-on surface demeanor and the watery depths of vulnerability just below the surface. For this tall task, we nominate Dame Judi Dench as our first, last, and only choice to play the grief-stricken literary icon.

For more than forty years, Dench has practiced her own brand of sorcery, conjuring a staggering range of vivid, palpably real characters on the stage and screens big and small, in every genre imaginable. She’s equally adept at playing regal as she is rough and tumble. But it’s the flinty intensity she brought to her Oscar-nominated turn as an obsessive schoolmarm in “Notes on a Scandal” that constitutes our closing argument for why Dench should play Didion. Exhibit A: The two share a physical similarity that’s more apparent in the parts taken separately than the collective whole. Both have a halo of silver hair, laser-beam eyes, and a thin jagged mouth cutting through a wide, pale tundra-like countenance. Exhibit B: In nearly every scene of “Notes on a Scandal,” Dench transforms herself into a wounded lioness whose pride and propriety wage war against her quivering vulnerability and barely contained panic. Exhibit C: Dench is as succinct in communicating madness embedded in grief as Pinsky and Didion. Case closed.

Tags: Casting Call, Cate Blanchett, Joan Didion, Judi Dench, The Year of Magical Thinking, Vanessa Redgrave