The Great Lillian Hall (2024)
Jessica Lange has always been magnetic on screen, but in The Great Lillian Hall, she delivers something that feels deeply personal—a performance that seems to channel not just her character’s struggle, but perhaps her own relationship with ageing in an industry that rarely forgives it. Lange plays Lillian Hall, a Broadway legend whose mind is beginning to betray her just as she prepares for what could be her final bow.
What struck me most about this film is how it refuses to make Lillian’s dementia the villain of the story. Too many movies treat cognitive decline like a monster that devours everything good about a person. Here, director Michael Cristofer understands that the real tragedy isn’t the forgetting—it’s watching someone whose entire sense of self is built around their craft slowly lose their grip on it. For performers like Lillian, the theatre isn’t just a job; it’s oxygen.
The film knows its theatrical DNA and doesn’t apologise for it. You can see echoes of the great stage actresses—Gena Rowlands, Glenda Jackson, Vanessa Redgrave—in how Lillian carries herself, even as uncertainty creeps in around the edges. There’s something uniquely cruel about watching an actress, someone who has spent her life inhabiting other people’s words, begin to lose her own.
Lange navigates this role with remarkable subtlety. Yes, there are moments of theatrical grandeur—Lillian is, after all, a woman who has lived her life under spotlights. But it’s the smaller moments that devastate: the way her hand trembles slightly when she thinks no one is looking, the flash of panic when a familiar line suddenly feels foreign in her mouth. Lange has always been fearless as an actress, but here she shows us something we rarely see—vulnerability without vanity.
The supporting cast understands the assignment. Kathy Bates, as Lillian’s longtime friend and fierce protector, brings exactly the kind of no-nonsense warmth you’d want in your corner during a crisis. Pierce Brosnan surprised me in a smaller role that could have been thankless but instead becomes quietly moving. And Lily Rabe, playing Lillian’s estranged daughter, captures something I recognise from my own life—that particular heartbreak of trying to reach someone you love who seems to be slipping away, one conversation at a time.
Cristofer’s direction is refreshingly restrained. In lesser hands, this material could have become maudlin or overly sentimental. Instead, he trusts his actors and his story. The cinematography won’t win any awards—it’s competent but rarely inspired—and there are moments where the visual plainness works against the film’s emotional richness. But honestly? Sometimes simplicity serves the story better than flourish.
The production design gets the details right in ways that matter. Lillian’s dressing room feels lived-in, cluttered with the detritus of a long career. The theatre itself has that particular kind of worn elegance that only comes with decades of performances, of dreams realised and hearts broken in equal measure. These spaces feel real, not like movie sets.
If there’s one thing that consistently worked for me, it’s how the film handles time. Memory loss doesn’t follow a neat narrative arc, and neither does this movie. Some scenes linger longer than they might in a more conventional drama, but that pacing mirrors Lillian’s experience—time becomes elastic when you can’t trust your own mind to fill in the gaps.
I kept thinking about other films that tackle similar themes—Still Alice, The Father—but The Great Lillian Hall feels less interested in the mechanics of dementia and more focused on what it means to lose the thing that defines you. It’s not really about forgetting; it’s about identity, legacy, and the particular terror of artists who realise their instrument is failing them.
The film isn’t perfect. Some of the secondary characters feel underdeveloped, and there are moments where the sentiment threatens to tip into cliché. The visual style could use more personality. But these feel like minor complaints when measured against what the film gets right.
This is a movie for people who understand that getting older in America—especially as a woman, especially in the entertainment industry—requires a particular kind of courage. It’s for anyone who has watched a parent or grandparent struggle with memory loss and felt helpless in the face of it. It’s for theatre lovers who know that the stage has its own kind of magic, one that doesn’t always translate to film but somehow does here.
The Great Lillian Hall won’t be the loudest movie you see this year, or the flashiest. But it might be one of the most honest—about ageing, about identity, about the price of a life spent in service to art. And anchored by Jessica Lange’s fearless performance, it’s the kind of film that stays with you long after the credits, like a melody you can’t quite shake.