THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

Midway through the theatrical adaptation of her novel, The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion regards herself and her family as “safe” from life’s pain and misfortune. How ironic, how bitter, how poignant, thought BFP. Here, as hard and clear as a diamond is a great deal of what Ms. Didion feels about grief. One of the smartest, sharpest essayists of the past fifty years and a quite successful screenwriter and novelist as well, Ms Didion boasts of her Prada bags and Manolo shoes, her homes in Malibu and on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Joan Didion, through the soft assertive voice of Vanessa Redgrave is shouting, “If I am not safe, who the hell is?”

The backstory, for those cinemaniacs who do not too often get a chance to read a newspaper: Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne, himself a noted writer, and his wife, Ms. Didion, watch helplessly as their only daughter, Quintana, 39, falls ill. At first it was diagnosed as the flu, then pneumonia. Whatever the cause, Quintana, just five months after her marriage, goes into septic shock. The doctors place her on life support, and then into an induced coma. Days later--the night before New Year's Eve—the Dunne’s return home after visiting Quintana at the hospital. Within a minute of sitting down at table, Mr. Dunne suffers a massive, fatal heart attack. An enriching, challenging, devoted marriage of forty years tragically terminated. Four weeks later, Quintana recovers. Two months later, however, arriving at LA airport, Quintana collapses and undergoes six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

As a means of dealing with her intense grief, Ms. Didion found herself writing the book that would help get her through it. She movingly recounts knowing her husband is dead and yet, at the same time, believing that if she acts just so, she can get John back. Her magical thinking. Ms. Didion finishes the book and, in a terrible coda, Quintana dies shortly afterward.

Vanessa Redgrave is, as always, brilliant. Although BFP thought he infrequently detected an ever so subtle Irish lilt to Ms. Redgrave’s American inflection, she held BFP enthralled for the entire ninety minutes. BFP understood what Jane Fonda remarked about Ms. Redgrave in her 2005 autobiography: "there is a quality about Vanessa that makes me feel as if she resides in a netherworld of mystery that eludes the rest of us mortals. Her voice seems to come from some deep place that knows all suffering and all secrets…Like Marlon Brando, Vanessa…always seemed to be in another reality, working off some secret, magnetic, inner rhythm. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanessa_Redgrave )

After leaving the Booth Theater BFP kept going back to the notion that the more you can control, the better off you are. If only it were true. Control freaks like BFP would all live past 100, and live quite well at that. Control is absolutely essential for a perfectionist like Ms.Didion (Or at least, the exacting personality of the “Joan Didion” character played by Ms. Redgrave.), and probably no small part of her success. She’s been reported to work on a paragraph for weeks. Control, it would seem, is Ms. Didion’s indispensable agency of coping. It offers her the illusory comfort of thinking she is safe from the terrors of life, and then when those terrible woes strike, she again calls upon her desire for order to ward off real chaos and allay real pain. BFP understood: thinking you can control life is the real magical thinking.