Cinequest 2021: ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’
by Rachel Bellwoar
Who is Jane? If you’ve ever read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, about a woman whose mental health concerns are dismissed by her husband, it’s a question you’ve probably asked before. Who is this person that’s never mentioned until the end? Why introduce them so late and without explanation?
One interpretation, and the one Kevin Pontuti and Alexandra Loreth go with in their screenplay for the film adaptation is that Jane is the name of The Yellow Wallpaper’s unreliable narrator – the woman whose husband thinks a rest cure will solve all their problems. Instead of relying on voiceover, though, to tell a first-person story, Pontuti (as director) tries to come up with ways to tell a first-person narrative visually. The results are mixed but never lazy, and while the reduced access to Jane’s thoughts could leave some points obtuse for viewers who haven’t read Gilman’s story, Pontuti’s The Yellow Wallpaper takes chances and sometimes those chances payoff.
A perfect example of this is with the opening scene, in which Pontuti solves the problem of how to alert viewers to the fact that they can’t trust anything they see in this movie. When reading Gilman’s story, there’s always an awareness that there are things Jane isn’t saying – a bitter subtext to everything she writes. The challenge in adapting it for film is figuring out a way of creating that same effect without depending on voiceover to replicate the first-person narration.
Pontuti’s answer is to not backpedal whenever something strange happens in the movie. In the book, a big shocker is when Jane mentions she has a baby, because It comes out of nowhere and becomes this huge reminder that Jane can leave things out if she wants. To pull that off in a film, though, even if the baby didn’t show up on camera there would still be the noise.
If the surprise isn’t that the child’s there, then, it becomes how Jane (Loreth) reacts to the cries. Pontuti keeps the camera on Jane’s face (and despite being in the same carriage, Jane and her husband, John (Joe Mullins), aren’t in the same frame, an early sign that they don’t communicate), and while Loreth doesn’t make Jane immune to the yells, she is doing everything she can to ignore them, like they’ll stop if she doesn’t acknowledge them.
Throughout the movie, this is how John treats Jane’s “nervous condition,” which could be undiagnosed postpartum depression – like nothing is wrong and Jane just needs rest. When Jane adopts the same approach with the baby, however, John tells her, “Please dear, do something.” So Jane does something. She picks up the baby and throws it out the window. John yells at the driver to, “Stop!” while Jane stares. After the title card it’s like nothing ever happened. The carriage rolls up to the house. John and Jane get out. The baby is passed over to their servant, Mary (Clara Harte).
What happened? Did Jane throw the child out the window, or is that what she wanted to do? Since the baby isn’t hurt, the answer is seemingly obvious, but because Pontuti doesn’t include that snap back moment where Jane returns to reality, the scene is disconcerting and makes you question what this family is capable of repressing.
The reason the film and short story are called The Yellow Wallpaper is because there’s yellow wallpaper in the room John picks to be their bedroom. John rented the house for the summer and while Jane tries to convince him to pick a different room, the wallpaper becomes an obsession of hers. Instead of adopting Jane’s point of view, though, Pontuti shows the walls as they are, not as Jane imagines them to be. On the one hand, this cuts deeper than any VFX would’ve because it makes Jane’s story a tragedy rather than a horror film, which could be dismissed as fantasy. To understand the ending, though, and to make sense of the story Pontuti and Loreth are trying to tell with the editing, which gets more abstract as the film goes on, you need to realize that Jane thinks there’s a woman in the walls. Jane does mention it in the film (and the voiceover uses direct quotes from the text) but not as much as she does in Gilman’s story, which reads like a diary.
On a similar note, when Jane writes in the story it’s because she has no one else to confide in. Both Mary and John’s sister, Jennie (Jeanne O’Connor), play more prominent roles in the film, yet Pontuti retains that sense of isolation by casting doubt over whether Jane is actually talking to them. While Loreth’s mostly silent performance goes a long way in tracking Jane’s psychological journey, it can’t completely compensate for what’s lost in not knowing exactly what Jane is thinking most of the time. Especially as Jane’s conditions start to worsen, Pontuti’s directorial choices, like having Jane suddenly switch locations, start not to translate as well without some knowledge of Gilman’s story.
The Yellow Wallpaper may hold up as a film adaptation but it’s ultimately too dependent on its source material to stand alone.
The Yellow Wallpaper premiered on Saturday, March 20th as part of Cinequest. It can be streamed as part of the festival until March 30th.
