PLAY IT AS IT LAYS and the Existential Nightmare of Hollywood

Some novels capture the look and feel of a certain place so completely that you feel like you know it intimately, even if you’ve never been there before. Somehow, you already know this place, its sights, sounds, and smells, and most importantly, how it makes the people in it feel. Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays is such a novel for the city of Los Angeles, tearing down the facade of glamor built up by Hollywood’s architects over the years to reveal the ugliness and unhappiness that persists behind the scenes. It is a world rife with scheming and superficiality, where people manage to say lots of words without any of them meaning anything, and where your real self isn’t as important as the self you depict on screen. I read it before I’d ever visited Los Angeles, yet it captures the city so well that when I finally set foot there, I had a strange sense of deja vu—as though I’d been there before in a dream, or perhaps rather a nightmare.

Play It as It Lays is the story of a woman who, wrung dry by Hollywood life, descends into a sun-drenched existential crisis. It was adapted for the big screen by Didion and her husband and collaborator, John Gregory Dunne, in 1972, yet the resulting film—directed by Frank Perry, who unfortunately may be best known today for Mommie Dearest—has been surprisingly difficult to see over the years. Fortunately, Play It as It Lays has finally emerged from the Universal Pictures vault and made it back to the big screen in a new 4K restoration, and its haunting depiction of Los Angeles life has lost none of its potency as time has passed.

California Dreamin’

Play It as It Lays centers on Maria Wyeth (Tuesday Weld), a model-turned-actress from a small Nevada town that numbered 28 residents when she lived there and numbers zero now. Her parents are both dead; the only people who can attest to the person she was before she moved to Los Angeles are a few old family friends she manages to track down. Instead, the world knows her best as the wife and muse of “cult director” Carter Lang (Adam Roarke), who exploited her fresh-faced beauty and tangled personal history in films that straddle the line between fiction and nonfiction. Their marriage is now on the rocks, and so is Maria’s career; she’d much rather be driving the seemingly endless series of Los Angeles freeways or spending time with her institutionalized daughter, Kate, than playing a role picked for her by Carter or anyone else.

As Maria drifts from glamorous Hollywood parties to seedy Las Vegas casinos, from dusty desert film sets to antiseptic illegal abortionist offices, she encounters a variety of different Hollywood characters: gangster lawyers, narcissistic television stars, even a hypnotist. However, the only person with whom she truly connects is B.Z. (Anthony Perkins), a closeted film producer who is married to a woman at his mother’s insistence. Like Maria, B.Z. knows what it’s like to feel one’s true self slipping away the longer one plays the game of life. The main difference between them is that Maria keeps playing despite believing it is all ultimately meaningless, while B.Z. finds himself increasingly unwilling to continue.

Born to Die

Maria’s past and present erupt in flashes throughout Play It as It Lays, allowing the audience to experience the passage of time as Maria does: fragmented, disjointed, and hallucinatory. It’s one thing to be able to create such an effect on the page; that this not-entirely-chronological storyline and the effect it has on your psyche are accurately translated to the screen by Didion, Dunne, and Perry is remarkable, and probably only achieved because the novel’s original author played such a pivotal role in the adaptation. Your own mileage may vary depending on how much you connect with Maria’s fragile mental state and nihilistic worldview, but I found the film had the same intense emotional effect on me that the book did when I first read it.

With her self-destructive tendencies—including drinking excessively and engaging in adulterous affairs seemingly just to feel something—Maria has never been considered a particularly likable protagonist. Yet that doesn’t mean she isn’t a relatable one, especially as embodied by the always-underrated Tuesday Weld, whose richly layered performance combines an innate vulnerability with a stubborn will to survive. She is also one of the most stylish heroines in cinema history courtesy of costume designer Joel Schumacher (yes, he of the nippled batsuit); recurring pieces, like a sleek black turtleneck, oversized purple sunglasses, and fitted trench coat, create a striking visual image of Maria that remains constant as the story is in flux.

It’s not just Maria’s wardrobe that looks fantastic; cinematographer Jordan Cronenworth (Blade Runner) captures the wide expanse of Los Angeles from freeway to desert in a way that emphasizes the surreal beauty of the landscape as well as its emptiness. However, the real highlight of the film is Anthony Perkins (who, for the record, is also dressed impeccably) and his nuanced, natural performance as B.Z. It’s clear that both he and Weld brought a lot of their own lives to their work in Play It as It Lays, but considering what we know about Perkins’s sexuality and the lengths he went to repress it, there is an extra undercurrent of tragedy inherent in his character that cannot fail to move you.

Conclusion

Play It as It Lays is the rare adaptation of a literary masterpiece that lives up to the source material, and a fitting cinematic tribute to the power of Didion’s pen.

The new 4K restoration of Play It as It Lays opens at Film Forum in New York on March 7, 2025.