Shoddy in conception and construction, this adaptation of the 1973 Broadway musical—based on Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night and featuring music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim—is most interesting for the presence of Elizabeth Taylor, who is at once sorely out of place and somehow the movie’s centripetal force. (I guess that’s star power?) She plays Desiree Armfeldt, a stage actress, circa 1900 Vienna, and the hub of an ever-expanding array of interconnected mistresses, wives, husbands, sons, daughters, and others. Taylor may not have the singing chops Sondheim’s material requires, but there’s a brash attitude and eventual vulnerability to her performance that nevertheless charms, culminating in a surprisingly moving rendition of “Send in the Clowns.” Otherwise, A Little Night Music is a supposedly scandalous sex comedy undone by an endless array of uninteresting medium shots and storeroom lighting, the latter of which makes poor Taylor look 30 in some scenes and 70 in others.
(2/5/2022)
