‘The Great Lillian Hall’ – Review
When the curtain rises on The Great Lillian Hall, what you’re witnessing isn’t just a film, it’s a love letter to the theatre, to art, and to the kind of luminous performance that only a legend like Jessica Lange could deliver. Directed with delicate poignancy by Michael Cristofer, The Great Lillian Hall is a quiet storm of emotion, introspection, and legacy, and it gives Lange the kind of role that defines a career, not just crowns it.
Broadway actress Lillian Hall (Jessica Lange) pours her heart and soul into preparing for her next big role but finds herself blindsided by confusion and forgetfulness. She strives to make it to opening night while holding on to her fading memories and identity.
Set in the intoxicating world of Broadway’s backstage drama, The Great Lillian Hall follows the story of Lillian Hall (Jessica Lange), an iconic, larger-than-life stage actress still commanding the spotlight well into her seventies. But as rehearsals begin for a new production of The Cherry Orchard, cracks begin to show, not in her talent, but in her memory. As Lillian struggles with the early signs of dementia, she’s faced with the challenge of holding on to the identity that has defined her entire life.
There’s something powerfully meta about watching Lange, herself an American icon, portray a woman wrestling with time, memory, and relevance. She’s magnetic in every frame. Her Lillian is fire and fragility, wrapped up in old-school glamour and tragic vulnerability. Whether she’s delivering a scorching monologue from Chekhov or lost in the fog of forgotten lines, Lange commands your attention with nuance, heartbreak, and staggering grace. It’s the kind of performance awards seasons are built around.
Surrounding her is a stellar supporting cast. Kathy Bates plays Lillian’s longtime best friend and former co-star Edith with scene-stealing warmth and prickly humour, their chemistry delivering some of the film’s most intimate and honest moments. Lily Rabe brings quiet strength as Lillian’s long-suffering daughter Margaret, caught between admiration and resentment for the mother who always put the stage before family. And Jesse Williams offers a soft but steady presence as the theatre director trying to keep the production and Lillian afloat.
What sets The Great Lillian Hall apart is its tone — part elegy, part celebration. It’s a slow-burning chamber piece filled with moments that ache with beauty. The film doesn’t overplay the melodrama; instead, it lingers in the spaces between memory and performance, truth and illusion. There’s a raw theatricality to it, not surprising given Cristofer’s own roots in theatre, and the film pulses with the atmosphere of dressing rooms, rehearsals, and standing ovations. If you’ve ever loved the stage, this one will hit you right in the soul.
Cinematographer Simon Dennis bathes the film in golden tones and soft shadows, giving everything a dreamlike glow, like the spotlight is always just barely out of reach. It’s intimate, often handheld, capturing Lillian in vulnerable closeups that feel uncomfortably real. While the score is gently melancholic, drifting like a forgotten melody echoing through a theatre long after the last performance.
Yes, the pacing leans contemplative, and some may find its quieter beats too restrained. But that’s precisely the point. The Great Lillian Hall is not a shout but a whisper, a poignant meditation on what it means to give your life to your art, and what happens when that art starts slipping through your fingers.
In an era of bombastic blockbusters and rapid-fire spectacle, The Great Lillian Hall feels like a graceful curtain call for a style of filmmaking, and performance, we don’t see enough of anymore. It’s the kind of film that lingers with you, not just because of what it says about aging, memory, and the cost of greatness, but because of how fiercely, unapologetically it lets its leading lady shine.
Image: Transmission Films
