Death of a Salesman (1985) - film review

Travelling salesman Willy Loman has lived his life convinced that he and his family are destined for success.  Now aged 63 he realises the hollowness of his dreams.  Knowing that he is worth more dead than alive, he contemplates killing himself.  Willy once had great hopes for his two sons, Biff and Happy, but now he can hardly bare to look at them - the first is a drifter who cannot decide what to do with his life, the second is a cynical puffed-up womaniser.  Concerned by Willy’s deteriorating state of mind, his wife Linda persuades Biff to return to the family home for a while.  Despite his antipathy towards his father, Biff decides to make an effort to find a well-paid job.  Meanwhile, Willy, tired of fruitless round trips, makes up his mind to ask his employer for a job in town.  His boss is not sympathetic and, after a heated exchange, dismisses him.  When he learns that Biff has notched up yet another failure, Willy knows what he must do next...

Arthur Miller’s sour critique of the American dream is powerfully rendered in this made-for-television film adaptation, which came hot on the heels of a successful revival of the play on Broadway in 1984.  Dustin Hoffman played the central character, Willy Loman, in both the stage revival and this film version, confounding the critics with a character performance that does justice to the part and is easily one of his finest.  The film was directed by the acclaimed German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff who had previously scored a notable international success with The Tin Drum (1979).  The excellent cast includes a young John Malkovich in one of his earliest screen roles and Kate Reid, a renowned actress of stage and screen who was best-known at the time for playing Aunt Lil Trotter in the TV series Dallas.

The 1980s revival of Death of a Salesman was timely and the play remains highly relevant to this day.  Originally written in the post-war boom of the late 1940s, Miller’s play exposes the crass hollowness of the American dream and laments the fact that in today’s society a man is measured far more by what he sells than by what he does.  In our present profit-oriented world, man has become a mere unit of economic worth, so that success and failure are judged only by what he earns, not on his wider contribution to society.  The play struck a chord when it was first performed but it probably had even greater resonance when it was revived in the mid-1980s during the me-me-me boom of the Regan-Bush years, an era when materialism and greedy self-interest were at their most rampant.  Of all the great works that Arthur Miller wrote, Death of a Salesman is the one that has greatest social and moral resonance today, and what is most striking when watching Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation is how relevant it still is.  Sixty years after the play was first performed, we still plod along on the same old economic treadmill like mindless sheep, wasting our lives in pursuit of a dream that is so manifestly a blatant lie.  Like Willy, freedom only comes when we are dead.

Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of Willy Loman is far from sympathetic.  He is a deluded, sour-tempered, prematurely aged man who rails against his family, his employer and his friends, unable to admit the failure of his life, unwilling to accept help from others.  Yet, oddly, it is Loman’s complete inability to extricate himself from the phoney reality he has chosen to inhabit that makes him an engaging tragic anti-hero.  We see in him something of ourselves, just one of countless well-meaning suckers who have been seduced by the Dream, conned into thinking that success lies only in a mountain of greenbacks.  Willy Loman believes too much in his own ability and fails to see that the world around him has changed.  To succeed, it is not sufficient to be liked - you must also be ruthless and single-minded.   It would have been easy to portray Loman as a foolish and pathetic old man, but Hoffman gives him a vitality and nobility that compels us to identify with him as his world slowly and inevitably falls to pieces amid the detritus of spent hopes and fractured dreams.

John Malkovich’s portrayal of Biff is just as compelling, even if the character is somewhat less convincingly developed than Loman’s.  It takes a while before we understand why Biff fell so far of his father’s expectations, but from the outset we see that the wayward son represents the extent of Loman’s failure and delusion.  In a performance of a rare intensity and poignancy, Malkovich brings home the full tragedy of a father-son relationship that has been poisoned by the failure of each to live up to the other’s expectations.  If the final heart-wrenching confrontation between Biff and his father doesn’t bring a lump to your throat you must have had an emotional bypass.   Hoffman and Malkovich’s performances, supplemented by the arresting contributions of Kate Reid and Stephen Lang, lend a viscerally cruel edge to Willy Loman’s tragic tale and make this one of the most stirring interpretations of Miller’s play that you are ever likely to see.

© Alex Sullivan 2011

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