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‘The Great Lillian Hall’ Review: Jessica Lange Is Grand as a Legendary Stage Actress Confronting Dementia

Lange is so good that she gives this therapy-corn version of The Show Must Go On a worldly center you can roll with and almost believe in.

The film takes place during the early onset of Lillian’s symptoms, so that even though she’s in rehearsal for a major new Broadway production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” where she has to contend with memory issues, the movie isn’t some gothic medical soap opera in which she suddenly starts to forget who she is. Her most dramatic symptom, however, remain offstage: She keeps hallucinating that she’s seeing her beloved late husband, Carson (Michael Rose), a theater director who for some reason looks like an elegant European drug trafficker. There are a couple of scenes that tap into the agony of dementia (and Lange, at those moments, is powerful), but “The Great Lillian Hall” is mostly a feel-good movie about using acting to turn the lemons life hands you into a grand illusion of lemonade.

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